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Version control second coming

psantosl.github.io

11–20 of 70 posts

Re: Version control second coming

#11
Now that the revolution has apparently started, does anyone know of a version control system which uses encrypted storage? (I'm not concerned about performance, for I will use it for small projects only.)

Re: Version control second coming

#13

2/3 down the article I gave up. What are you trying to tell me? What is this revolution about? How are agent things fundamentally different and how are they being solved? What is this "second coming"? Also, why "second"? Was git the first? But then what about all the other things before it? CVS was huge before, for better or worse.

I gave up after 5 seconds.

Blog authors need a straight up TL;DR because I ain't reading all of that.

Re: Version control second coming

#14
post #2

Dreaming of "virtual filesystems everywhere". Hmm, sorta sounds like Plan 9. Great to have an inside view of wrangling technologies for these behemoth data sets.

I wonder if we're doing virtual filesystems wrong.

There is a good reason why traditionally filesystem access was mediated by the OS layer, but there are many use cases where you just want to give processes a different view of what they already can access and it could be done as a library in the same userspace process.

However, for that to work across all the processes in a session we'd need a standard way to install such a hook in all peocesses and that's achievable to some extent using LD preload but falls apart quite rapidly with statically built binaries or different libcs

Re: Version control second coming

#15
post #2

Dreaming of "virtual filesystems everywhere". Hmm, sorta sounds like Plan 9. Great to have an inside view of wrangling technologies for these behemoth data sets.

Plan 9 had such a powerful model for networked systems using these virtual file systems, it sounds like a fairytale! Oh, want to use that other machine as a gateway? Just mount its /net. Oh, want to route audio through another machine? Just mount their soundcard into your /dev. Oh, your machine is too puny to do the task at hand? Just run “cpu thebigmachine” which transplanted your entire environment over there (all…

Have a look at Objective-Smalltalk[1][2], with polymorphic identifiers[3] (all identifiers are URIs), storage combinators[4] (virtual filesystems on steroids), and polymorphic write streams[5] (streams everywhere).

Objective-Smalltalk basically provides the sorts of things you write about locally at the language level. You could also move specific instances behind an operating system boundary.

[1] https://objective.st

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689492.3690052

[3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2508168.2508169

[4] https://2019.splashcon.org/details/splash-2019-Onward-papers...

[5] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359619.3359748

Re: Version control second coming

#16

2/3 down the article I gave up. What are you trying to tell me? What is this revolution about? How are agent things fundamentally different and how are they being solved? What is this "second coming"? Also, why "second"? Was git the first? But then what about all the other things before it? CVS was huge before, for better or worse.

I gave up after 5 seconds. Blog authors need a straight up TL;DR because I ain't reading all of that.

Well, I like a good story, there is big potential in this long form stuff that's more than a tweet or two. There can be a great reward when the crux is revealed after building a foundation and then looking at it from different angles. But if that crux never comes then it's really just leaving a feeling of disappointment and waste of time that I invested into reading all this. And that does a disservice to everybody else writing blog posts.

I think that's part of why tiktok and yt shorts really took off. It's so short that if you realize it's bad and move on then your wasted investment in terms of time and energy was negligible. (Times 200 that's a different story but signal-to-noise is still high enough that people accept this.)

Re: Version control second coming

#17

2/3 down the article I gave up. What are you trying to tell me? What is this revolution about? How are agent things fundamentally different and how are they being solved? What is this "second coming"? Also, why "second"? Was git the first? But then what about all the other things before it? CVS was huge before, for better or worse.

I gave up after 5 seconds. Blog authors need a straight up TL;DR because I ain't reading all of that.

This is my dilemma. Do I feel like giving up because it isn’t written well or because my attention span is shot? Hard to tell.

Re: Version control second coming

#19
post #2

Dreaming of "virtual filesystems everywhere". Hmm, sorta sounds like Plan 9. Great to have an inside view of wrangling technologies for these behemoth data sets.

Plan 9 had such a powerful model for networked systems using these virtual file systems, it sounds like a fairytale! Oh, want to use that other machine as a gateway? Just mount its /net. Oh, want to route audio through another machine? Just mount their soundcard into your /dev. Oh, your machine is too puny to do the task at hand? Just run “cpu thebigmachine” which transplanted your entire environment over there (all…

Oh wow, I didn't know it had things like that.

Especially the CPU functionality is really interesting. I'm pondering similar problems and the current solutions just aren't good enough.

Re: Version control second coming

#20
It's great to see some moves to break up this great calcification around git. Gut greatest contribution to version control was stagnation. The space was evolving with great fresh ideas before git became a quasi-religion among the early adopters because Linus made it in a day and therefore it must be great or something. I'm exaggerating somewhat, but the zeal of some people back then was next level annoying.

Beyond that, git has a great deal of shortcomings, some obvious, some subtle. It was a regression against SVN in some ways and inferior to Mercurial in others. But the strengths of SCN and Mercurial are again vastly different. There is a reason SVN isn't dead.

My biggest gripe with the open source VCSes is that in the last 20 years, no meaningful evolution happened in the established tools, especially around any weaknesses. Commercial systems like Plastic and Perforce as well as proprietary solutions like piper/jujutsu and sapling show that the tools can still improve drastically. I'm excited for a future where we get better open tools for the masses.

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