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Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

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Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#31
post #22
post #4

Is my company's private information e.g. source code kept end-to-end encrypted?

All data is encrypted in-transit and at-rest, as per the industry standard. End-to-end encryption is an interesting feature with obvious extended privacy benefits on one hand, that could prevent a system from providing other features on the other hand. Depending on the requirement for end-to-end encryption, in some instances a custom NDA can be signed to mitigate a specific concern. It's a feature we haven't seen muc…

I think the question is "can any one outside my company/org access my code". Apparently it is because the tool offers cloud collaboration using web UI.

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#32
post #19

Nice. I make music and use git for my files, but often hit the usual space limitations and I hate dealing with git-lfs. I think there's a big use case for Diversion and music/video production.

Did you try git-annex instead of git-lfs?

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#33
post #16

I have not analyzed the full potentials and benefits of Diversion but I would not agree with the statements you made about the Git. I think you should not focus on Git in your pitch. >> it was built for a very different world in 2005 (slow networks, much smaller projects, no cloud) Slow network: why is this a negative thing? If something is designed for a slow network then it should perform well in a fast network. Mu…

> Slow network: why is this a negative thing? If something is designed for a slow network then it should perform well in a fast network.

Designing for resource-constrained systems usually means you're making tradeoffs. If the resource constraint is removed, you're no longer getting the benefit of that tradeoff but are paying the costs.

For example, TCP was designed for slow and unreliable networks. When networks got faster, the design decisions that made sense for slow networks (e.g. 32 bit sequence numbers, 16 bit window sizes) became untenable, and they had to spend effort on retrofitting the protocol to work around these restrictions (TCP timestamps, window scaling).

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#34
post #16

I have not analyzed the full potentials and benefits of Diversion but I would not agree with the statements you made about the Git. I think you should not focus on Git in your pitch. >> it was built for a very different world in 2005 (slow networks, much smaller projects, no cloud) Slow network: why is this a negative thing? If something is designed for a slow network then it should perform well in a fast network. Mu…

>> a data scientist accidentally destroyed a month’s work of his team

> This is mostly a configuration issue

git apologism :)

(FWIW I do agree with the rest of your comment, and I hope you forgive the slight joke. Product users, for any product are fallible humans. That might be fallible in accidentally deleting, or it might be fallible in forgetting to turn on the safety settings.)

Very seriously, something like this should not be possible in a source control system. Data integrity needs to be built in by design.

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#35
post #22
post #4

Is my company's private information e.g. source code kept end-to-end encrypted?

All data is encrypted in-transit and at-rest, as per the industry standard. End-to-end encryption is an interesting feature with obvious extended privacy benefits on one hand, that could prevent a system from providing other features on the other hand. Depending on the requirement for end-to-end encryption, in some instances a custom NDA can be signed to mitigate a specific concern. It's a feature we haven't seen muc…

So, the answer is No.

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#36
post #29
post #16

I have not analyzed the full potentials and benefits of Diversion but I would not agree with the statements you made about the Git. I think you should not focus on Git in your pitch. >> it was built for a very different world in 2005 (slow networks, much smaller projects, no cloud) Slow network: why is this a negative thing? If something is designed for a slow network then it should perform well in a fast network. Mu…

> This is mostly a configuration issue. I guess this was done by a force push command. IFAIK, you can disable force push by configuration. If a feature can lead to actual unintended data loss, it should come disabled by default. Are there any other "unsafe by default" features in Git? What would be a sane general default that prevents unwanted data loss, and why is it the case?

--force always imply data loss. You're overriding the remote state.

Do people use it in an unsafe manner because they don't understand git and there lies a problem that could be tackled? yes.

With that, I don't think git has any feature that is unsafe by default.

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#37
post #16

I have not analyzed the full potentials and benefits of Diversion but I would not agree with the statements you made about the Git. I think you should not focus on Git in your pitch. >> it was built for a very different world in 2005 (slow networks, much smaller projects, no cloud) Slow network: why is this a negative thing? If something is designed for a slow network then it should perform well in a fast network. Mu…

Thanks! We're definitely not trying to bash Git, it's done a lot of good for software development and for sure is going to continue evolving.

Git had much more edge when it was competing vs SVN and other centralized VCSs. With 10Mb networks (if you were in office) you could feel physical pain when committing stuff >Reg how Git is not perfect in the cloud world - check out GitHub's blog post here about their cloud dev environment, Codespaces https://github.blog/2021-08-11-githubs-engineering-team-move...

"The GitHub.com repository is almost 13 GB on disk; simply cloning the repository takes 20 minutes."

Moving 13GB inside your own cloud should take seconds at most. The problem is the way Git works, it clones your entire repository into the container with your cloud environment, using a slow network protocol. With Diversion it takes a few seconds.

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#38
post #16

I have not analyzed the full potentials and benefits of Diversion but I would not agree with the statements you made about the Git. I think you should not focus on Git in your pitch. >> it was built for a very different world in 2005 (slow networks, much smaller projects, no cloud) Slow network: why is this a negative thing? If something is designed for a slow network then it should perform well in a fast network. Mu…

Even a force push doesn't destroy the reflog or runs the GC server-side. I wonder how you can accidentally loose data with Git. I've seen lot's of people not being able to find it, but really destroying it is hard.

Destroying it and nobody knowing how to recover, or that it can be recovered at all, it are identical.

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#39
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All data is encrypted in-transit and at-rest, as per the industry standard. End-to-end encryption is an interesting feature with obvious extended privacy benefits on one hand, that could prevent a system from providing other features on the other hand. Depending on the requirement for end-to-end encryption, in some instances a custom NDA can be signed to mitigate a specific concern. It's a feature we haven't seen muc…

I think the question is "can any one outside my company/org access my code". Apparently it is because the tool offers cloud collaboration using web UI.

If you share your repository with a collaborator, they can access it of course. Same is true if you share your repository with end-to-end encryption, your collaborator should be able to decrypt and use it.

Re: Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative

#40
> I often wondered why Git is so difficult to learn, compared to other tools.

Yes! This is something many people wonder -- other than those who love git :) I used to love Mercurial and I still mourn its mostly-loss. So I welcome a new DVCS system that is friendlier than git.

> Diversion’s code is managed on Diversion!

This is a good sign.

> can synchronize with existing Git repositories (each new commit in Diversion goes into Git, and vice versa)

Can you expand on what this means please? Does it simply mirror, or is it feature-for-feature compatible? Is it a backup capability?

> still using legacy tools like SVN and Perforce

I won't argue re SVN, but Perforce? It's used in the game industry primarily for its excellent handling of binaries / large binaries. How well does Diversion handle that kind of thing -- multigigabyte data sets, frequently changing?

The site says large files are fine, but that's too vague for games, IMO. Large, frequently changing, binary-not-text hard-to-diff files?

Edit: one final question: why cloud only? Why not software that can be locally hosted, or hosted by (other) service providers? What if I love Diversion and want to run a Diversion setup on my own Linux box in a cupboard?

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