What comes after Git • Hacker News Board

Re: What comes after Git

#261

Post by sophacles » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 1:06 PM UTC

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…

> marvel at how it ever became popular.

It's worth going through old HN comment sections that have flamewars of SVN v git (or cvs vs hg or whatever) from 2006-2012 or so. The dvcs systems won because they changed a bad paradigm to one that's much much better - literally the way you think about version control these days is a radical departure from the previous way it was done. Merges are much much nicer in git then they ever were in those old systems - I've never spent more than an hour dealing with the results of git issues, but I've lost literal weeks to a single svn mishap.

Why did git win over other dvcs systems?

2 main reasons I see:

1. Linux uses it - literally, that means its the "cool one"

2. Linux uses it - and that means the people developing it work similar to the kernel, they are willing to try a lot of different ways to acheive the task resulting in both some amazing cool stuff and a lot of cruft left hanging out for various compatability and "accidentally super important structurally" reasons.

Re: What comes after Git

#262

Post by mabbo » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 1:06 PM UTC

alksdeef wrote: post #240

mabbo wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine. It works. But it's not intuitive. A decade of near daily use of it, as the 'git guy' on most teams I'm in, and I'm still spending time searching how to do specific things. To use a UX term, there's very few affordances telling me what I should expect, guiding my intuition. Imagine a VCS where it was obvious and easy to figure out how to do anything that is possible. Along with all the power that git brings…

Seems like that's been done pretty well with all the wrappers, tui and gui's available.. what else is needed?

All the things built on top are limited to the things their creators decided were needed. They'll never be as powerful as git itself.

I want a successor to git that provides as much or more power but with the intuitive usability.

Is that so much to ask? (I joke)

Re: What comes after Git

#263

Post by tempest_ » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 1:07 PM UTC

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #111

indy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

hg up --clean i dont know why mercurial doesn't get more love.

We used hg when I started at my current position.

From a developer stand point the experience was better but all the tooling and integrations are git based so we switched.

Re: What comes after Git

#264

Post by SulphurSmell » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 1:08 PM UTC

I wish I could answer this. I have always had a penchant for any robust versioning system. Even the simple ones (CVS and the like) were amazeballs to me at the time. 20 odd years ago I spent a lot of time with ClearCase (initially Rational, now Rational IBM). I was amazed at what could be done. We had dozens of customers, maybe 3 major and 10-14 minor versions in the field, and probably dozens of "bug fix" or "special customer branches". Oh, and likely 2 or 3 on-going major version dev branches. Somehow, it all worked. If you could describe (by whiteboard or hand-waving) what you wanted to see as your working branch, it could be done. "Give me a view that is exactly what customer x has, but for this directory, give me latest, except for this file...I want that one from customer y" . And blam! The CC guys would make it happen. The magical config spec. I have had to dabble in many other SCMs.. SVN, Git, etc...and they all seemed to be a compromise. Or, just ran out of gas when the going got tough. In my mind, I wish I could argue that ClearCase was where it was at, and the patterns it supported would be wonderful to have today...especially over Git. But I don't know enough to defend the point. All I am saying is that even with enormously complex version scenarios, the damn thing didn't break and we all got our work done.

Re: What comes after Git

#265

Post by al2o3cr » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 1:13 PM UTC

sriku wrote: post #146

I've been using fossil ( https://fossil-scm.org ) for personal projects for like a decade now and I much prefer it over git. The characteristics that get me to stick with it are - 1. Single file executable. No dependencies to "install". Just the executable and you're good. 2. The whole repo is a single sqlite DB file. Fabulous for backups, sharing, hosting etc. 3. You cannot rewrite history unlike git. Hence the name…

    3. You cannot rewrite history unlike git. Hence the name.

So if somebody accidentally commits customer data to the monorepo, just burn down the whole company and start over?

Re: What comes after Git

#266

Post by nailer » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 1:14 PM UTC

> Semantic diff has been tried before, but language-specific implementations will likely never work.

Why not? Storing code as code (ie storing an AST not text) and treating all changes as a CRDT, allowing your refactor to use a variable I just renamed without merge conflicts, seems completely reasonable.

Re: What comes after Git

#267

Post by nailer » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 1:16 PM UTC

mpermar wrote: post #167

>Nearly a decade later, new problems arose when Kubernetes (the operating system of the cloud) brought open-source collaboration to a new level. I'd love to get more context to that statement to understand it better because as it is, it sounds as such an arbitrary statement that undermines the credibility of all the content below. Kubernetes didn't brought open-source collaboration to a new level. No matter how relev…

Kubernetes main contribution to tech is “let’s do it all using kubernetes” as a meme for wasted time.

It references the effort and money wasted by people that wanted to build cloud providers despite not being in the business of being a cloud provider.

Re: What comes after Git

#268

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 1:18 PM UTC

mpermar wrote: post #167

>Nearly a decade later, new problems arose when Kubernetes (the operating system of the cloud) brought open-source collaboration to a new level. I'd love to get more context to that statement to understand it better because as it is, it sounds as such an arbitrary statement that undermines the credibility of all the content below. Kubernetes didn't brought open-source collaboration to a new level. No matter how relev…

[deleted]

Re: What comes after Git

#269

Post by tsimionescu » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 1:18 PM UTC

shikoba wrote: post #230

tsimionescu wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People "cling desperately" to the way they are actually working. That Git uses an alien model that happens to somewhat match what I'm doing doesn't mean I'm "desperately clinging" to the actual reality of what I'm doing (editing a file).

So if someone creates a new file and integrate the content of the old file to reach the same folder state than yours, you think s/he does something different?

Yes? Editing a file is different from creating a new file with some code copied from somewhere else, obviously. They may reach the same end state, but that doesn't make them the same operation.

It also happens that one is much, much more common in software development than the other, so it's a much better mental model of what SEs do.

Re: What comes after Git

#270

Post by Art_Wolf » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

SulphurSmell wrote: post #264

I wish I could answer this. I have always had a penchant for any robust versioning system. Even the simple ones (CVS and the like) were amazeballs to me at the time. 20 odd years ago I spent a lot of time with ClearCase (initially Rational, now Rational IBM). I was amazed at what could be done. We had dozens of customers, maybe 3 major and 10-14 minor versions in the field, and probably dozens of "bug fix" or "specia…

One reason we moved off it was because it was a bandwidth hog! I believe they had two clients to try and help with this, a thin and think client. Even with the thin one, with the CC servers hosted in the states and some developers located in Europe, it would take a half hour for the client to refresh and pull down the latest changes.