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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

#251

Post by distortedsignal »

myfonj wrote: post #234

Out of curiosity, are there any VCSs that operate on AST instead of plaintext lines? (Or is something like this being developed or proven impossible?) I guess it should be possible to cooperate on shared codebase without need for every contributor to check in and out text files following exactly the same formatting. Or even naming convention. Or even same language, provided all collaborators can transpile to and from…

I was thinking about trying this out, but there are some reasons why I don't think it's feasible.

Where are your comments stored?

What happens when you need to run out in the middle of a fire and you don't have time to make your code compile-able? How do you commit "un-compile-able" changes?

I think there are some really compelling reasons to try AST-checkin - all your loops can now be changed to functional, dialect changes like you mention, etc. - but there are some pretty significant downsides as well.

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

#252

Post by laeri »

aseipp wrote: post #249
rajeevk wrote: 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…

The Windows Git repository is only 300GB, that's basically childs' play when people are talking about "large repo scalability". Average game developer projects will be multiple terabytes per branch, with a very high number of extremely large files, and very large histories on top of it. Git actually still does handle large files very poorly, not only extremely large repos in aggregate. The problem with large Git repo…

This includes assets right or some kind of prebuilt data in custom formats? Otherwise it would be hard to have this much data in source files.

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

#253

Post by withinboredom »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #85
lemome wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time we need to host our own servers for licensing issues, you might need to consider a "on premises" option if you want to be an viable option for a lot of studios.

This sounds like a classic innovator's dilemma style division in the market. The incumbents need to cater to existing customers with a need to host their own servers for licensing reasons; but this forbids them from using cloud native features in the core of their products. There may well be space for a newcomer to make a cloud only product targeted at the subset of studios that have the legal ability to use the clou…

My understanding from reading much of OPs responses is that “the cloud” may be vendor locked to AWS. There are serious issues there to hosting your code on servers most likely owned by a competitor. E-Commerce, video streaming, games, AI, video production, electronics, retail, pharmaceuticals, logistics, publishing, etc. Like they literally picked the worst vendor to build this on.

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

#254

Post by grogenaut »

itslennysfault wrote: post #246

Little feedback on the "how is it different from Perforce" section of the web page. There have to be more advantages than "it's in the cloud" ...right? Also, for many this is potentially a huge hurdle / disadvantage. Who are you, and why should we trust you with our precious IP / code? (many game studios are on-prem very intentionally) Personally, I'm currently (being forced to) use Perforce and I've learned to toler…

For me the absurd size of data in the game I worked on, terrabytes of video, mocap data, assets, made cloud hard and expensive. Cloud makes me think of all that time I'm blocked on network up and my poor data caps for my employees

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

#255

Post by Kharacternyk »

myfonj wrote: post #234

Out of curiosity, are there any VCSs that operate on AST instead of plaintext lines? (Or is something like this being developed or proven impossible?) I guess it should be possible to cooperate on shared codebase without need for every contributor to check in and out text files following exactly the same formatting. Or even naming convention. Or even same language, provided all collaborators can transpile to and from…

This would enable some advanced merge conflict resolution strategies, I suppose. However, it can also be done by building the ASTs on demand and still storing plain text.

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

#256

Post by dmazzoni »

vintagedave wrote: post #34
rajeevk wrote: 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 thi…

What if someone pushes something inappropriate? Shouldn't there be a way to delete it?

As an example, what if someone pushes:

- A private key or password - Copyrighted content - Illegal content

In cases like this, it needs to be possible to remove the bad commit from the repository entirely.

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

#257

Post by igorguerrero »

egaldv wrote: post #200
igorguerrero wrote: post #130

Taking a decentralized application like Git back to centralization is a step in the wrong direction, it's exactly why Git was created.

Decentralization is a cool concept, but didn't GitHub and BitBucket emerge because a centralized server was in demand? Git is a good tool for many uses, but when was the last time you pushed directly to a peer's repo on their machine? How many firewall and reverse proxy configurations did you have to setup to be able to do it?

It's kinda the standard procedure of securing your machine's ssh, I'd recommend trying to setup a bare repo and put it online so you see how easy it is to make it work, that's not Github but it's more than enough for your org, in fact before Github was created that's how we did it, it doesn't really take more than 1 afternoon to set it up, multi-user and all the other jazz.

But Github and Bitbucket aren't examples to compare Diversion to though, Github is just a node in the decentralized network of Git repos (your users, or whoever cloned). They even use an example of this feature, how they were able to recover after a mess-up, then with SVN that couldn't be done and they'd have really lose more than a month of work.

There's one of the reasons why Git was created, to make it easier to resolve conflicts, if you just want a main / children branches structure in one server then use SVN / Diversion but then don't complain when you have a branch "locked" and you cannot get your job done.

Diversion makes 100% sense if you follow the silly "one repo for the whole org" way big companies do, which still doesn't make any sense to me.

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

#258

Post by dmazzoni »

Rygian wrote: post #29
rajeevk wrote: 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?

But it doesn't lead to data loss.

The commits that were overwritten by "force" are still there on the server. Any admin could recover them pretty easily. They're probably still present in the local repo of the person who ran "git push --force" too, as well as anyone else's machine who has cloned the repo.

The only way you'd actually lose data is if every single person who had a clone of the repo ran gc.

Or apparently if nobody knew about "git reflog" and nobody bothered to do a Google search for "oops I accidentally force pushed in git" to learn how to fix it.

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

#259

Post by [deleted] »

philsnow wrote: post #248
oblio wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't focus too much on "git complexity" as most people already know git so it just creates an argument. I'd say this phrase is both right and wrong. It's right in the sense that it creates an argument. It's wrong in that it creates an argument with the peanut gallery of git experts. But guess what, most people using git are not experts. They're software developers who don't want to learn the intricacies of git (pr…

> peanut gallery of git experts There are people who use git for its original purpose (kernel devs and very few others) and then there is the remaining 99% of people who essentially use “github flavored git”, using only three or four git subcommands and for the most part never needing to understand its intricacies. Unfortunately, although they are using git-the-chainsaw-shotgun with all the safeties on, it’s nonethel…

[deleted]

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

#260

Post by Arelius »

Arelius wrote: post #247

Ok, I'll bite. Looks interesting. My first thought, as a gamedev who has been in charge of selecting VCS at multiple studios. 1TB is not a lot, and I would really appreciate clear public pricing terms on data before committing to a VCS. Esp at the smaller indie scale.

Continuing:

> Yes! It can integrate with any CI tool via Git compatibility, or using the API. Talk to us for more details.

You really need to provide a comprehensive cli targeted to CI/Build. Git really is really going to be a bottleneck for games, and most teams aren't going to want to figure out the hassle of manually figuring out differential updates and multi-part downloads via REST

Secondly, I watched your video, and dug through the website, and saw no mention of what your Windows story is. As a gamedev I'm going to need some assurance that your Windows support is top-notch.

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