Earlier quoted context omitted.
an evil brother
No, just different. It's not like he had a goatee.
“Nobody who tries to kill Wesley can be all bad”
Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
331–340 of 717 posts
Re: Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now explain this to an artist with very little programming experience beyond what they picked up from their coworkers. I don't mean to be too glib, but some programmers have this decrepit idea that anyone working with computers should understand programming to be able to fully utilize them. I worked in gamedev, and many of my colleagues were brilliant, but your comment would read as complete nonsense to many of them.…
I'm not here to engage in rhetorical combat. I was simply answering niek_pas's rhetorical questions, that's all, because maybe they piqued someone's curiosity and I can contribute a little of my esoteric knowledge about the inner workings of git. This is a site for the curious, yes? Git is a tool by programmers for programmers. If folks outside the programming community are able to use it, great, but that's not its t…
I apologize if I came off harsh and combative. Gamedev is a passion for me and I spent many years in that field, including working on proprietary version control systems because existing ones like SVN, Git, Perforce...etc did not fit the needs of the team.
One of the things I very frequently heard from the non-programmer disciplines was how obtuse and indecipherable the existing version control systems were. That is where I'm coming from.
Your knowledge is still appreciated, by me as well, because while I am well familiar with the way git works, I have worked with many people who were not, and did not have the time or budget in their minds for understanding it because they had many other concerns. That is what I mean when I said that I worked with some brilliant people -- I could not do even a modicum of what some of them were capable, and likewise they probably weren't capable of the same modicum of what I was doing.
I don't know what specifically the GP post was trying to insinuate, if anything at all, but it resonated with me as someone who had experienced the same thing many times over in my career. And I probably judged your comment a little harshly on first read, which is mea culpa. You provided good information for those newer to git and seeking to understand how it actually works besides the cheat sheet guides you so often find.
> Git is a tool by programmers for programmers. If folks outside the programming community are able to use it, great, but that's not its target audience. You don't need to convince me why git isn't suitable for artists.
Precisely, and I think Lore is an interesting proposition for exactly that reason.
Re: Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
#333Any multiregion deployment requires DynamoDB. Shame this solution is specific to AWS.
Re: Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
#334For context, since a lot of people on HN haven't worked on games - this is not intended to compete with Git for general software development. This is a competitor with Perforce for game development. Git is fine for text based files like code, but it's really bad at stuff like textures, 3D models, audio files, and other non-text files that game developers need to collaborate on. For example, one artist might need to o…
> this is not intended to compete with Git for general software development. This is a competitor with Perforce for game development. Well, it is intended to compete with Git for version control. It's just that Git happens to be so bad at some aspects of version control that it isn't used much in those cases. There's no good reason that Git couldn't be good at versioning binary files, or splitting up large projects.…
It feels like a Pareto Principle problem. 80% of source control is text files that can be three-way merged as text files, but a lot of hard problems are in that 20% that isn't.
Git does very well at the 80% and with tools like custom merge tools and git lfs/annex and git sparse "cone" checkouts can get pretty close to hitting the 90 or 95% case.
But yeah, so many of those extra tools in that 80 to 90% area are awful to work with because they aren't the default, aren't out the box, are hard to configure and get right. Partly because it always seems like there will be a gap in that 95%-100% window and partly because the use cases that need that 80% to 90% often are only "just 10% of use cases".
(Which is also to say that to survive Jujitsu and Pijul and others seem to have to work to make sure they handle the 80% base case extremely well just to compete with git, they haven't necessarily time to think about the 90% or 100% problem.)
(ETA: And also relates to why game development seems to feel the 20% cases more, because by volume of data game development is certainly closer to a flip of the 80/20 sides with 80% or more large binaries by volume.)
Re: Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way I usually solve this is by using git submodules.
AFAIK the issue with using submodules is you still need the rights to pull the other source repo. However, you can use submodules or LFS to pull a specific build artifact from a build artifact repo or source instead of the source repo, which provides a neat way to manage the dep without fattening the main repo and allows the source repo to be kept separate and high security. I'd certainly do this before changing RCS/…
You'd have the non-NDA, core stuff in the submodule. The submodule can then be referenced by the big, driving NDA repo. And maybe another repo with a non-NDA, likely simpler "shell" that lets non-NDA devs work with the codebase.
If you need to NDA the core stuff instead and thus can't pull it as a submodule, the only thing I can think of is to pull the core as binary/compiled artifacts.
Re: Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh man, I've been laughing at this for 37 minutes straight now.
Git submodules are the regular expressions of version control.
When you use regular expressions, you now have two problems.
When you use git submodules, you now have five or six problems.
Re: Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Objects are your files. Underlying git is a content-addressable filesystem. The objects are referenced by trees. A tree is just a directory. The trees are then referenced by commits and/or tags into a DAG with named pointers into various parts of it (which are your branch and tag references): https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects Because it would be terribly in-efficient to have a bunch of loose ob…
Respectfully, I think you're missing the point. The GP is not asking for an explanation (and could look that up from the Git docs) but commenting on how user-hostile it is. There's lots of software like this, which is so unfriendly that once you've learned the minimum of how to do something and verify it worked, you don't want to touch it any more unless you really need to. CLI output should be in plain language and…
I dont think the problem is even verbosity here - it really isnt that much text.
The issue is what you and the above points out - it is not easy to read.
What might help dramatically is a simple modification of text (the verbose stuff could be slightly light grey and the important bits fully highlighted white) or even go full IRC with colored text, bold, etc.
Or hell - maybe instead they add a switch that inserts "//comment" like additionally lines to explain what is going on (succinctly) to the average Power User type. The default could be "software engineer" mode and the switch enable "Git for Dummies" mode.
Re: Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
#338For context, since a lot of people on HN haven't worked on games - this is not intended to compete with Git for general software development. This is a competitor with Perforce for game development. Git is fine for text based files like code, but it's really bad at stuff like textures, 3D models, audio files, and other non-text files that game developers need to collaborate on. For example, one artist might need to o…
There's also the virtual streams (branches). A mapped overlay over the actual contents of the repo, which you can check out and get a subset of the contents. Or even can provide different files that have been mapped in the server for each particular virtual branch.
This is used so e.g. an artist gets a repo that contains sources for the art assets, while a programmer gets the same repo but instead of art sources, it downloads the already produced binaries. As a SE, you just want to build the code, and don't care about 800 GB of art asset sources.
Re: Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now explain this to an artist with very little programming experience beyond what they picked up from their coworkers. I don't mean to be too glib, but some programmers have this decrepit idea that anyone working with computers should understand programming to be able to fully utilize them. I worked in gamedev, and many of my colleagues were brilliant, but your comment would read as complete nonsense to many of them.…
> I don't mean to be too glib, but some programmers have this decrepit idea that anyone working with computers should understand programming to be able to fully utilize them. Git is a software development tool first and foremost to support the development of an _operating system kernel_. It's perfectly reasonable for it to be technically verbose as a default, in the same way as it's reasonable for a band saw to cut o…
While I agree that git is a tool for the development of an operating system kernel, it's become clear that this is not the general perception of it. I don't mean those of us who have followed it throughout it's evolution, but those that are not 'in the know'. I have heard probably too many programmers pushing it as the end-all-be-all solution for version control even in environments not appropriate for it.
I will disagree that the output is too complex; it is. And yes, the large binaries issue is also a huge challenge to it's use. There's only so much time in the day, and when you work in gamedev there are often severe pressures to perform, and spending extra time to get into the weeds of a version control system is often not possible without sacrifice.
Re: Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
All Data is Lore. I mean lore is a superset of data. I mean data is lore with a special attribute. I'm not just picking nits here. And this is not cynicism. so there you go.
I'm not the parent, but I suppose it was a joke reference to Star Trek where Data (an android character) discovers he has a brother named Lore [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_Star_Trek:_The_N...
As is my reply.
(Trek) Data is Lore constrained to, what? Convention?