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Show HN: Sturdy – online-first version control focused on collaboration

getsturdy.com

21–30 of 43 posts

Re: Show HN: Sturdy – online-first version control focused on collaboration

#22
> We felt that collaborating on code today is broken.

Today is the day that I read “we feel that x today is broken” one too many times and just scrolled past. It has now become startup marketing speak. On reflection, I thought it might be helpful to mention. This has no bearing at all on the quality of the startup or their product, just a note about the wording being over used

Re: Show HN: Sturdy – online-first version control focused on collaboration

#25
Consider me interested. I have never gotten quite warm with git and definitely agree about the overhead about project management ticket + branch + PR for small changes.

Git should be challenged. I can’t imagine that’s the best we can do. What will ultimately determine this project’s viability for larger projects is whether it’s really as powerful.

I’m definitely excited for new VCS solutions as I think the current state is a bit less than optimal.

Edit: Uhm, where’s the code? How do I self host?

Re: Show HN: Sturdy – online-first version control focused on collaboration

#26
Anyway to self-host this? I don't see much use for other people on my team seeing my line-by-line edits in real time in their own editor as opposed to just watching on screen share, but I like to work on multiple hosts on my own LAN and it's annoying to have to push to a git server to synchronize, and easy to forget. I tried to just mount all of my repos via NFS, but the performance was atrocious and git didn't seem to like it, and I aborted the effort rather than try to figure out why. Going out to the Internet when you're only trying to synchronize on a LAN is pretty wasteful. Of course, even on teams that want to use this, plenty of them will be on the same LAN if they're working out of an office, and might want a service like this only on their own LAN to avoid wasting ISP bandwidth to synchronize between people in the same literal room.

Honestly, I feel with something like this, it'd be nice if you created some sort of "lib{NAME}" with functionality to synchronize some subset of versioned, diffable files between directories, that may or may not be on the same host. The primary motivation would be to build your own service on top of that library, but then other people could build different services on top of it to suit their own needs. Sort of how there is such a rich variety of alternative package managers for Arch Linux because all of the core pacman functionality is encapsulated in libalpm.

Re: Show HN: Sturdy – online-first version control focused on collaboration

#27

Consider me interested. I have never gotten quite warm with git and definitely agree about the overhead about project management ticket + branch + PR for small changes. Git should be challenged. I can’t imagine that’s the best we can do. What will ultimately determine this project’s viability for larger projects is whether it’s really as powerful. I’m definitely excited for new VCS solutions as I think the current st…

Thanks for the support!

My favourite take on the attitude the community has towards Git was posted by rossdavidh [1] in the "Git is too hard" thread:

> "Git is the bad boyfriend of the developer community. If anything bad happens it was your fault. If you ask it to do something and it does something else, it was your fault, and also you are stupid."

There must be a better way to do things, and we've made it our mission to find it.

We're not open-source yet. If you're interested in self hosting, reach out to me at gustav@getsturdy.com and we'll make it happen!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25124213

Re: Show HN: Sturdy – online-first version control focused on collaboration

#29
this may work well for teams of 2-5, I simply don't see this working at all for any larger teams or any team with formal development processes.

The whole idea of merges/PRs etc is to be able to formalize this stuff, track it, keep history etc in a way that is open and can be used with multiple tools.

Using some kind of proprietary, or even open source, web backend SaaS completely defeats this.

And the whole 'real time google docs for code' is going to be incredibly intrusive for most experienced devs. People dont make a habit of micro inspecting every line of code someone writes, no one has the time for that. The whole idea is to have good design practices, unit tests, CI/CD etc, good APIs and interfaces.

Sturdy sounds great for small startups who are all basically working on a single shared file and everyone is doing some sort of massive pair programming. That simply doesnt work for other models and is a nightmare. Learning git (or any other vcs) is a tiny tiny part of software development, its not a barrier like its being presented unless you are a junior dev starting out.

Re: Show HN: Sturdy – online-first version control focused on collaboration

#30
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to see that you're dogfooding you're own software. As a budding git enthusiast, I have a few questions. How are things like merge conflicts handled? Does sturdy support rebasing or some equivalent? Is there an equivalent to hooks? I sometimes deplug when I want to get in the flow, how well does sturdy perform offline (no internet connection)?

Sturdy handles conflicts in pretty much the same way as Git does ( https://getsturdy.com/features/conflicts ). The history in Sturdy is linear, and we’re doing the equivalent of a rebase behind the scenes when changes are shared from a workspace that’s behind the trunk. I’ve been dreaming about creating contextually aware merging, so that for example adding two methods at the end of a class doesn’t conflict, but we’r…

Regarding hooks, at my company we use them to ensure that our commit messages contain our ticket items so work is always linked to our project management tool. I've seen hooks used for running code static analysis to meet project guidelines and generate ctags.
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