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What comes after Git

matt-rickard.com

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Re: What comes after Git

#61

Post by niek_pas »

enasterosophes wrote: post #52
tedk-42 wrote: post #30

Oh god this author again going after clicks for hit pieces on technology without providing any alternatives. If you think you can do it better then go ahead and try build the product and then pitch it.

I didn't recognize the author, but came here to say the same thing: where are the ideas on how these improvements would be implemented? Without making an attempt at implementation, you (the generic you, not the person I'm replying to) have no idea what the real issues are. Even failed or partial implementations are more instructive than armchair criticisms, or thought experiments where you can just handwave away all…

Fair, although I think we need to understand git’s shortcomings to understand what product needs to be built next. I’d argue that’s what this author is doing.

Re: What comes after Git

#62

Post by drewcoo »

torginus wrote: post #13

My main issue with Git, other than the terrible UX of the CLI, is just how common it is for one to want to rewrite the commit history - an operation for which there's no version control. You better get it right, or otherwise you get to nuke the whole repository.

And as a black-eyed veteran of DCS and (oh, thank god, SVN) and P4 and other stuff, and migrations from one to another and . . . often stuff that wasn't actually source control . . .

I say stuff it!

Re: What comes after Git

#63

Post by thunderbong »

bergenty wrote: post #8
stellalo wrote: post #4

> I saw the pain points of git What are these? Asking for real: it’s the second time I read a similar sentence on HN this week, without finding any specifics, so I’m curious

I’m not qualified to go into specifics but I hate it. All version control needs to do is pull, push and branch. Version on branch is newer? You need to pull down before you can check in. Instead what we get is over complicated nonsense with commits and stashes, rebases and heads, reparenting etc. I get it you don’t want to store your code on your local machine but that’s what backups are for, that’s not what the vers…

You should give Fossil a shot

https://fossil-scm.org

Re: What comes after Git

#64

Post by drewcoo »

stellalo wrote: post #4

> I saw the pain points of git What are these? Asking for real: it’s the second time I read a similar sentence on HN this week, without finding any specifics, so I’m curious

Yes. I am also asking "for a friend!"

Re: What comes after Git

#66

Post by silisili »

Every time I use Git, I see how bad the UX is and marvel at how it ever became popular.

Even a simple merge/rebase leaves one confused. Which should I use? What is incoming? Why does incoming change as you progress? I didn't change anything (on purpose) but Git won't let me change branches. What the hell does stashing do? How do I just unfuck what I did and go back to a branch? These are rather common use cases, and today people still just nuke a directory because they can't figure out the arcane arts. I am one of those people, at times. Because it's faster to do so than read heaps of manpages for a situation I may never hit again.

Git might have awesome tech underneath, I really don't know or care. But someone needs to really spend time in a typical dev's shoes to make it nicer to use.

Re: What comes after Git

#67

Post by glandium »

nine_k wrote: post #38
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Git is slow on large repos, even on an SSD. Maybe on Windows, but then everything is slow on Windows. On my 2015-era machine `git pull` on the Linux kernel source tree is nearly instantaneous after the remote objects are downloaded. Same with `git status`, `git diff`, etc. I mean, that's what it was developed for, because everything else was slow.

How about `git status`? The first SSD I bought back in 2008 was to put a large git repo on it; it helped. With much larger repos, like those I had to work with at Facebook, even an NVMe drive becomes a bit uncomfortable, and one has to use something like Watchman [1] to track changes without a rather noticeable delay. [1]: https://github.com/facebook/watchman

FWIW, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31928844

Re: What comes after Git

#68

Post by comex »

nine_k wrote: post #41
torginus wrote: post #13

My main issue with Git, other than the terrible UX of the CLI, is just how common it is for one to want to rewrite the commit history - an operation for which there's no version control. You better get it right, or otherwise you get to nuke the whole repository.

There absolutely is version control for rewriting commit history, no fancy tools needed. Start another branch at the point where you want to rewrite history; don't switch to it: `git branch original-history-branch`. Now `git rebase` your branch to your heart's content. This branch will have the new, rewritten history. The original-history-branch still has your old history, refers to your old commits and prevents them…

That’s like saying the operating system has version control built in, no fancy tools needed, because you can `cp my-code.c original-my-code.c`, edit `my-code.c`, and have `original-my-code.c` just in case you’d like to reset your code to the old version.

That is to say - sure, it can work, but automated history tracking is far superior.

Though, git does at least have reflog, so if you accidentally delete or overwrite a branch, you should be able to get it back. That’s far better than the equivalent situation with files on a filesystem. But it’s still not real history tracking.

Re: What comes after Git

#69

Post by indy »

silisili wrote: post #66

Every time I use Git, I see how bad the UX is and marvel at how it ever became popular. Even a simple merge/rebase leaves one confused. Which should I use? What is incoming? Why does incoming change as you progress? I didn't change anything (on purpose) but Git won't let me change branches. What the hell does stashing do? How do I just unfuck what I did and go back to a branch? These are rather common use cases, and…

I wonder how many centuries of developer time have been wasted trying to "unfuck what I did and go back to a branch"?

Re: What comes after Git

#70

Post by efrecon »

rswail wrote: post #59

I'd really like issues porcelain that is built over git so that when I clone I get all of the project's history, as well as it being merged with pull requests etc. I hate that the github/lab hosting solutions end up with a central database to keep track of issues, CI, etc. It breaks the whole "distributed" model.

Maybe this? https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue. I've always wanted to give it a spin.
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