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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

#421

Post by danudey »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #323
hintymad wrote: post #282

> Cloud-Native Git Alternative Not sure if this is a good summary of the product. For one, cloud-native is an implementation detail, unless the company plans to sell the new VCS as packaged software instead of service. For two, I'm not sure how being cloud-native addresses any issue with my daily interaction with Git. > The biggest drawback of Git is its limited scalability I wonder how many people really has this pr…

Re: scalability, in the very first sentence they mention game development, which deals with large quantities of large (and growing), nowadays versioned assets like 3D models, textures, animations, etc.

As someone who worked on the backend (workflow, infra) side of a game dev studio, there are a lot of massive benefits I see with this sort of "what if Dropbox but Git" product workflow.

We couldn't actually use git for our asset management, because when you're dealing with 1GB+ Photoshop files, versioning them with any reasonable granularity breaks your Git repository, makes clone times and local file storage requirements astronomical, and doesn't really make sense anyway. We ended up using SVN, since it only transfers what you check out and you can check out subtrees trivially, but then that required getting a GUI SVN client, providing it to our art team, teaching them how to use it, and then having them come to me whenever something in SVN got confused or broken (e.g. they opened and then closed a document and Photoshop updated the thumbnail, now there's a merge conflict and they can't commit).

We also ended up using Google Drive for a lot of stuff, and eventually migrating to Team Drives once that was a thing, but that doesn't integrate with... basically anything, honestly, or at least not with any reasonable degree of straightforwardness.

I don't work for that company anymore, but the thing that would make me most interested in this product would be:

1. Self-hosting it (would pay 'enterprise' rates for this); or

2. Being able to locally proxy/cache assets for users in the office, so that committing a 1 GB PSD didn't require 20 artists to all pull down 1 GB each from the server

A lot of people seem to be comparing this to actual Git, but this doesn't replace Git unless you're using Git wrong; what it replaces is the absolute disaster of a workflow that a lot of companies have to try to build/use/teach internally.

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

#422

Post by danudey »

sasham wrote: post #398
oblio wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see 2 huge barriers for a new commercial VCS: 1. Devs don't like to pay for core tools. And VCSes need network effects. 2. VCSes seem to be really hard.

Totally agree, it won't be easy. Companies do pay for GitHub/GitLab/Perforce though, and for indie devs there's the free tier. I think what made git really take off is actually GitHub's free tier/OS hosting, and not git itself being free (at least for parts of the market, and I might be wrong). 100% correct about VCS development, it's much harder than one can expect.

> Companies do pay for GitHub/GitLab/Perforce though

Those products also provide a huge amount of other value and functionality (though at a high price).

As someone who worked at a (mobile) game dev studio, this "what if Dropbox but Git?" product design really hits for me. Teaching our artists to use Google Drive or Team Drives was easy, but the functionality isn't there. Teaching them to use SVN was a nightmare (because SVN workflows are a nightmare) but the functionality is... also not really there?

Give me either a local installation that I can set up in my office or a local proxy to reduce download speeds (or peer-to-peer on local network, the way Dropbox does it) and I could see this being beneficial for a lot of especially smaller studios.

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

#423

Post by maccard »

Arelius wrote: post #415
ryanlitalien wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That totally depends on where you put value. We're a fraction of other companies licenses for comparison. Also, we have new pricing for our new Helix Core Cloud SaaS product!

Yeah. New pricing, but not cheaper. Don't get me wrong. It's a fine price to pay for a studio going strong. But there is no way I can use it for starting my side-project indie game.

> there is no way I can use it for starting my side-project indie game.

I am not a defender of P4, but for some reason I'm defending them in this thread. It's free for [0] https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core/free-version-co...

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

#424

Post by Arelius »

maccard wrote: post #423
Arelius wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. New pricing, but not cheaper. Don't get me wrong. It's a fine price to pay for a studio going strong. But there is no way I can use it for starting my side-project indie game.

> there is no way I can use it for starting my side-project indie game. I am not a defender of P4, but for some reason I'm defending them in this thread. It's free for [0] https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core/free-version-co...

Yeah, but afaict, not their new cloud service.

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

#425

Post by maccard »

oDot wrote: post #290
maccard wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's good attempts at FOSS p4 replacements now, you need to do better if you want to stand out. There are? Like what?

I've been attempting this but have paused the efforts due to what seems like lack of interest -- giving me an indication that the problem is not that big of a deal.[0][1] If anyone is interested in my resuming them, let me know at contact at weedonandscott dot com [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/11s08ne/your_opinion_o... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/11s5haf/what_do_yo...

I don't read the replies here as a lack of interest, more as a lack of interest in the solution you've come up with.

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

#427

Post by oDot »

maccard wrote: post #425
oDot wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been attempting this but have paused the efforts due to what seems like lack of interest -- giving me an indication that the problem is not that big of a deal.[0][1] If anyone is interested in my resuming them, let me know at contact at weedonandscott dot com [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/11s08ne/your_opinion_o... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/11s5haf/what_do_yo...

I don't read the replies here as a lack of interest, more as a lack of interest in the solution you've come up with.

I don't disagree, but usually when a solution doesn't fix a painful problem, people are almost disappointed after getting their hopes high. In those posts, the commenters give me the impression that they are mildly annoyed at best (or worst).

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

#428

Post by devaiops9001 »

Git works fine with petabyte-scale projects and handles 100+ gigabyte files totally fine with some modest scripting.

For one of the projects I oversee a typical file size is about 8gb each and a handful are about 140gb. What we version with Git are a list of the files in ion (superset of JSON) so the 8gb files aren't "in" Git but just referred to via hashes by what is committed in Git. These files are accessed via CephFS and rsync. We have "server side" hashing of these files via SSH. All of the relevant scripts are in Git hooks.

Someone (external to our team) once commented that what I just described is "too complicated" and "not friendly for developer speed". Yeah, well, we don't hire stupid people so.. "thank you for your interest in this opportunity, we have decided to pursue other candidates at this time".

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

#429

Post by weebull »

vlovich123 wrote: post #419
weebull wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monorepos are a problem born of CI which can't cope with cross project dependencies properly. People have solved the problem by pumping everything together, but it's the wrong answer. Fix CI and the problem goes away.

Sorry no. CI and monorepos are at best tangentially related. Dependency tracking across repos is a PITA which inhibits code reuse - git sub modules suck as do whatever that alternative git submodule concept is called (subtree?). Code repos like Cargo and NPM can help but even still it’s an annoying dance to update dependencies in multiple downstream projects. And if there’s a code change you need to make, it’s a 3-wa…

That's exactly my point. Cross dependencies is exactly the problem I want CI to solve.

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

#430

Post by sasham »

oftenwrong wrote: post #384

Git is a tool for collaboration, but is sometimes a poor fit for the reality of centralised, corporate software development. I'd like to see a product that fills these gaps, and I sense that this is part of what Diversion is about. For example, large file support in git depends on clunky hacks (that I respect) like LFS, but Diversion aims to make it actually work seamlessly. Companies awkwardly split their projects a…

Thank you very much for the thoughtful comment! You're exactly right - Diversion's goal is to improve things such as what you mentioned. Moreover, we're aiming to build a flexible system that can be extended and improved further.

We'll definitely implement at least some of the things you mentioned!

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