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Version control second coming

psantosl.github.io

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Re: Version control second coming

#41

Post by teiferer »

thorum wrote: post #40
teiferer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

FWIW, I flagged and downvoted both of your comments. The article is a very interesting overview of the space and recent developments, and having to scroll past multiple paragraphs about your low attention span and reading difficulties to get to some actual technical discussion was quite frustrating!

Is flagging and downvoting really the right tool to express disagreement of opinion here? I disagree very much with what you just wrote, but I would not flag it.

For the next time, instead of scrolling, you can just press the little "-" next to a post which collapses it and its whole subtree. Out of sight.

Besides, I explicitly stated that I read 2/3 of the article. How is that "low attention span"? And I didn't just bash it, I formulated what I find missing in it. Do you have answers to those questions? And how does asking such questions indicate "reading difficulties"?

It's quite fascinating that if my comment is so appaling to you, why you'd take the time to respond. I thank you for that though.

Re: Version control second coming

#42

Post by vanderZwan »

teiferer wrote: post #10

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.

The author has a severe case of being oblivious to the fact that not everyone knows what they know, or views the world the way they do. As shown for example by their assertion that "we all stopped coding manually around December 2025", as if AI critics don't exist.

As a result you have to look at what they share about themselves to infer where they're going with things, because they never explicitly state it. All traits amplified for the worse when people use chat bots too much, in my experience.

Scrolling to the end, they write:

> In 2005 a dozen version control systems fought to replace Bitkeeper, and the winner ended up ruling software development for two decades. Nobody in that race predicted that the decisive factor would be a hosting site with a social network on top.

They had a VCM start-up around their own technology, then Git displaced all other technologies, and then Github ate everyone's lunch. So the first revolution not-so-coincidentally overlaps with the time they ran a SCM startup, and they ignore anything that happened before they entered the space. Funny that.

So the implicit context is the business case and programmer culture around VCM systems.

Meaning the second revolution is anything that challenges Git and Github.

They also keep bringing up gigantic mono-repos and how Git can't handle the scale at which AI increases the amount of code bloat or commits.

So what I read between the lines is that they believe that there are enough people who don't want to actually address the automated hyperscaled Wirth's Law in the room, and are willing to pay services and technology to adapt around it instead.

That's their new business case that will power the second "revolution".

Which sounds horrifying to me, and the worst part is that I can actually see it happening if this AI bubble doesn't pop fast enough.

Re: Version control second coming

#43

Post by foreigner »

The author mentions it briefly, but I'd like to see more exploration of what we can do differently now that we're all online all the time. I think that could potentially enable a Git-level revolution in the way we do things, similar to the way unlimited disk space did for Git.

Re: Version control second coming

#44

Post by CalRobert »

thorum wrote: post #40
teiferer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

FWIW, I flagged and downvoted both of your comments. The article is a very interesting overview of the space and recent developments, and having to scroll past multiple paragraphs about your low attention span and reading difficulties to get to some actual technical discussion was quite frustrating!

There is no reason to flag this.

Re: Version control second coming

#45

Post by soltanov »

colesantiago wrote: post #13
teiferer wrote: post #10

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.

fully agree. cant even started to read this. just skipped directly.

Re: Version control second coming

#46

Post by black_knight »

mpweiher wrote: post #15
black_knight wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.s…

Could you explain the connection you see a bit more?

Part of the appeal of the Plan 9 approach was that you could use any program in your distributed environment, written in any language, because the abstraction layer was the file system – the lingua Franca of IO.

Re: Version control second coming

#47

Post by collabs »

vanderZwan wrote: post #42
teiferer wrote: post #10

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.

The author has a severe case of being oblivious to the fact that not everyone knows what they know, or views the world the way they do. As shown for example by their assertion that "we all stopped coding manually around December 2025" , as if AI critics don't exist. As a result you have to look at what they share about themselves to infer where they're going with things, because they never explicitly state it. All tr…

> They also keep bringing up gigantic mono-repos and how Git can't handle the scale at which AI increases the amount of code bloat or commits.

I don't understand why everyone keeps saying "AI" can write code and somehow the rest of the world can't keep up when we haven't even solved a more basic problem that "AI" itself can't keep up with the code it writes. Claude on the web has to search and scan to find the relevant parts and for whatever reason there is a size limit to how much context I can give to claude and it is laughably low. Shouldn't we be trying to see if it can keep up with itself first? Also not all project files fit in the "context" so once you are in search mode anyway, why is the limit so arbitrarily small? Why not allow at least about 1GiB of plain text? Claude tells me 1 GiB is 250 million tokens and it is too much for current capacity but I thought the whole point of project files was not all of it is in the context window or whatever. It says it is in search mode anyway... So only search for the relevant bit and put only that in the context. You can limit your search to a particular submodule or something but still have broader context where required

Re: Version control second coming

#48

Post by asgeirn »

TLDR for those who gave up reading:

The distributed repos and "commit-then-push" metaphor might be due for a replacement since we're always online anyways and repos grow larger and larger. Perhaps using VFS where all files are always instantly available with copy-on-write semantics.

There are several players working on systems that work on thousands of commits per second scale, some based on Git and others not.

Re: Version control second coming

#49

Post by MindSpunk »

bob1029 wrote: post #33

It sounds like the author went through a lot of pain to avoid using git+lfs or perforce. I use git+lfs for unity projects and it works out great. If I had a real studio I'd buy some perforce seats. Reinventing the wheel like this is quite exhausting. There are options that are proven to work. AI authorship does not fundamentally violate the idea of some thing owning a specific commit. We don't need new schemas in our…

From my experience Git LFS is extremely brittle and will break your local check out if you so much as breath on it wrong. Perforce is an expensive solution to the problems of LFS, and I've yet to find a workflow as powerful as my git workflows for managing code.

I don't really see what the article is talking about as the future, but if P4 or Git LFS is the best we can do as a species then we're doomed. All VCS options suck for one reason or another, I hope we don't stop trying to make something better. If only to save me from perforce.

Re: Version control second coming

#50

Post by heisenbit »

rjsw wrote: post #18

People complained about having to use ClearCase back then, it wasn't just the price that was wrong with it.

The author praises the enterprise version vs. the more simpler one. Having had the pleasure coordinating one clearcase site in a very large distributed setup with significant replication traffic and windows and unix clients: It was an unstable mess.
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