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Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

fossil-scm.org

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Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#401

Post by wyoung2 »

ginko wrote: post #338
tomesch1982 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly the point. For git you need the ecosystem to cope with it's shortcomings and in addition some experts to help you out of the pickles this software gets you into. I mainly use fossil for personal projects. Whats nice about it is that it not only is a very capable VCS but also a complete project management tool with tickets/issues, wiki, blog, mailing list and user management. The setup is ridiculously…

>Whats nice about it is that it not only is a very capable VCS but also a complete project management tool with tickets/issues, wiki, blog, mailing list and user management. That seems like feature creep.

Not at all. There's a lot of nice stuff that falls out of Fossil's integration of these features, things which you don't get when you lash them up from separate parts.

For example, if I have a check-in comment "Fixes [abcd1234]" I get an automatic link from that check-in comment to ticket abcd1234 from the web UI's timeline view. If I then close that ticket, the comment in the timeline view is rendered in strikethrough text, so I don't have to visit the ticket to see that it's closed.

Similarly, a built-in forum means the project's developers can discuss things with easy internal reference to wiki articles, tickets, checkins...

A recent feature added to Fossil is the ability to have a wiki article bound to a particular check-in or branch, so that whenever someone views that artifact in the web UI, they get a link to the ongoing discussion about it. This is useful when you have more to say about the check-in or branch than can reasonably fit into a comment box. This solves a common problem with experimental features, where you want to discuss it and evolve the idea before it's merged back into the parent branch.

Fossil's user management features are also highly helpful.

    http://fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/caps/
With raw Git (no Github, GitLab, etc.) it's pretty much all-or-nothing, but with Fossil, you can say "this user can do these things, but not these other things." Thus you can set up a public project, giving anonymous users the ability to file tickets and read the forum but not make check-ins.

These features are as seductive as what Github, GitLab, BitBucket, etc. add to Git, but whereas those are all proprietary services with some of the roach hotel nature to them, with Fossil, you clone the repo and now you've got all of that locally, too. If the central repo goes down, you can stand your local clone up as a near-complete replacement for it.

It's not 100% because Fossil purposely doesn't clone a few things like the user table, for security reasons. You can build a new user table from the author names on the check-ins, though.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#402

Post by micimize »

fossil is a really interesting project, but the switching cost from git is pretty massive. The two killer issues for me: * community/history: any issue I have with git, someone else probably has had. Being a pioneer is very expensive, time wise. * ecosystem/tooling: aside from git host provided tooling, there're integrations for vscode, slack, CI, etc.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#403

Post by ldiracdelta »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #360
ldiracdelta wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also don't have to understand the underlying structure for a similarly powerful DVCS like bitkeeper. Yes, it isn't open source, but git was a major step back in usability for my group from bk to git.

Yes, this. I actually tried bk before git, and actually used bazaar and then mercurial before git as well. I was stunned at how arcane the UI in git was made (And how arrogant the community of users around it could be, too). Bk was clean and elegant frankly. I'm no idiot when it comes to the concepts -- but git's CLI interface is just awful. Bitkeeper is in fact open source now, BTW. Too late, but it is.

You're right. The arrogance was hilarious. People with no experience with bk saying, "What's your problem?" Now, git is super fast, because its core is written by Linus, but I think he is just so much better technically and so far into the internal weeds of Linux for so long in so many areas that he had trouble creating an API for mere mortals.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#404

Post by imtringued »

munmaek wrote: post #393
adrianmsmith wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing Git does not and cannot even attempt to do - file locking. The assumption behind Git is, everyone develops on their machines and/or branches, and then things are merged. This only works for files which can be merged. There are plenty of things pretty much any project wants to track which cannot be merged, for example Word documents (documentation), Photoshop files (source of graphics), PNGs (icons in we…

You should not be checking in binary files into git. That defeats the entire purpose and bloats the repo size enormously. Git LFS should be used instead. Or storing a Sha256sum and putting the file elsewhere.

That is a solution but then it's no longer distributed.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#405

Post by richie_adler »

Tade0 wrote: post #340
tasuki wrote: post #199

> I worry that Git might be the last mass-market DVCS within my lifetime. The possibility of git being the last mass-market DVCS within my lifetime leaves me with warm fuzzy feelings. Git is simple and elegant, though its interface might not be.

To me it's proof that we as an industry finally arrived at a consensus over something .

Yeah, but it's like Betamax losing to VHS.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#406

Post by munmaek »

baud147258 wrote: post #294
tasuki wrote: post #199

> I worry that Git might be the last mass-market DVCS within my lifetime. The possibility of git being the last mass-market DVCS within my lifetime leaves me with warm fuzzy feelings. Git is simple and elegant, though its interface might not be.

If its interface is not simple and elegant, I don't see how you can call git simple and elegant, since it's how all users will interact through the interface. And personally I prefer a VCS with less ways to shoot myself in the foot than git.

You can almost always recover from your mistakes with git reflog.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#407

Post by wyoung2 »

mcv wrote: post #278
tomesch1982 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly the point. For git you need the ecosystem to cope with it's shortcomings and in addition some experts to help you out of the pickles this software gets you into. I mainly use fossil for personal projects. Whats nice about it is that it not only is a very capable VCS but also a complete project management tool with tickets/issues, wiki, blog, mailing list and user management. The setup is ridiculously…

I hadn't heard of fossil yet, but I'll definitely look into it.

The simplest way to do that is to just use it for a local project. Say, you local ~/bin directory, containing your local scripts, or your editor's config files that you want sync'd everywhere, or a novel you're writing on the side.

If you're like me, you'll find yourself increasingly wonder, "Why would I put up with Git any time I'm not forced to by some outside concern?"

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#408

Post by alexhutcheson »

tzury wrote: post #397

Bazaar and Mercurial are dying... Bazaar is dead, and Mercurial is near death. Linus wrote the Linux kernel and it became the "de-facto standard" for web application stack servers (and phones, and watches, and Chroemcast and all sort of `Internet things`) Linus wrote git and it became the "de-facto standard" for version control. If a world had 23 more Linuses, we would have full control over our SaaS and "Clouds" and…

Facebook[1] and Google[2] have both publicly stated that they are using Mercurial internally, so "near death" seems like an exaggeration. Mercurial has some significant advantages over Git if you want to implement a scalable backend for really large repos.

[1] https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/scaling-mercurial-at-fa...

[2] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...

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