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Town Car Version Control

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: Town Car Version Control

#11

Post by gecko »

j_s wrote: post #7
tjbarbour wrote: post #2

It's good to see FogCreek being practical and adding in Git support, based on how strong they were pushing for Mercurial before (Joel even had an online training[0]) I wouldn't have guessed they would ever switch to Git, but as Joel said "Religious war: averted." I wish more software would mitigate these debates with solutions like this, but its often not that easy. This seems like a cool solution, I don't know if an…

http://www.plasticscm.com/features/lockin2.aspx > Plastic SCM [...] developed an importer that supports the fast-import > format introduced by Git and widely used to migrate from other systems Most source control systems assume a one-time import because they are so awesome there's no doubt you'll want to keep your code there forever, but the trend is to support at least Git semi-synchronously. http://codicesoftware.b…

Kiln Harmony is a little bit different than that. We are aiming that you can push a Git repo to Kiln, clone out an Hg repo, push that back to Kiln in an empty repo, and get back exactly the same Git repo you started with. This means that both format types are completely equal--and, more importantly, they're both canonical.

Plastic and Perforce are solving a very important, but fundamentally different, problem: how can I use Git to interface with my proprietary SCM? These problems tend to evolve solutions like git-svn or hgsubversion, where either you're keeping the initial repository around as a base (I believe Plastic does this), or you simply don't even care about it at all (e.g., in Perforce, its repos are assembled from arbitrary slices of the main source tree, so the same commit may have different files entirely from the one your neighbor is using, even though both repos include the same chunks of history).

Those are also valuable tools, and we did consider making what would amount to a Git front-end for Mercurial. But we really wanted both systems to be peers, both canonical, and that mandated a totally different set of design decisions and restrictions.

It's not that what Plastic and Perforce have aren't cool. They're just fundamentally different.

Re: Town Car Version Control

#12

Post by j_s »

gecko wrote: post #11
j_s wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.plasticscm.com/features/lockin2.aspx > Plastic SCM [...] developed an importer that supports the fast-import > format introduced by Git and widely used to migrate from other systems Most source control systems assume a one-time import because they are so awesome there's no doubt you'll want to keep your code there forever, but the trend is to support at least Git semi-synchronously. http://codicesoftware.b…

Kiln Harmony is a little bit different than that. We are aiming that you can push a Git repo to Kiln, clone out an Hg repo, push that back to Kiln in an empty repo, and get back exactly the same Git repo you started with. This means that both format types are completely equal--and, more importantly, they're both canonical. Plastic and Perforce are solving a very important, but fundamentally different, problem: how ca…

Thanks for clarifying what I meant when I said 'at least Git semi-synchronously'.

edit: Is it safe to summarize what you're saying as 'the best hg-git is kiln' ?

Re: Town Car Version Control

#13

Post by bradleyland »

famousactress wrote: post #4
tjbarbour wrote: post #2

It's good to see FogCreek being practical and adding in Git support, based on how strong they were pushing for Mercurial before (Joel even had an online training[0]) I wouldn't have guessed they would ever switch to Git, but as Joel said "Religious war: averted." I wish more software would mitigate these debates with solutions like this, but its often not that easy. This seems like a cool solution, I don't know if an…

Devil's advocating, but I worry about solutions like this. Abstractions leak, and if abstractions like this get traction they splinter tools' abilities to do useful things. I imagine there are corner cases where git/hg dissonance is high and wonder if this leads to a situation where we all have to care about whether a backend is capable of 'full git' or 'hg-compatible git'. There are places where this is valuable eno…

Interestingly, Joel (founder of FogCreek, producer of Kiln) wrote extensively about leaky abstractions:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...

Re: Town Car Version Control

#15

Post by rrrene »

He says Kiln has some advantages over github in the corporate space, while github has features for socialized open source coding:

    So, specifically, Kiln gives you corporate things like:

    * code reviews
    * access control and permissions
    * fast code search
    * a news feed to follow code you care about
    
    GitHub gives you things that match the sociology of open source projects:
    
    * public home pages
    * a social network, with profiles
    * fork and pull workflow
But doesn't github actually provide at least two of the four points he mentions for Kiln?

Re: Town Car Version Control

#16

Post by ahoyhere »

I can't say I would ever trust my code to a tool written by somebody who thinks that this is a good idea:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-ju...

Also, calling Github a "VW Microbus" and implying they're hippie kumbaya love-ins instead of a huge, well-supported tool with the features he implies they lack… well. It stretches credibility.

Re: Town Car Version Control

#17

Post by herge »

rrrene wrote: post #15

He says Kiln has some advantages over github in the corporate space, while github has features for socialized open source coding: So, specifically, Kiln gives you corporate things like: * code reviews * access control and permissions * fast code search * a news feed to follow code you care about GitHub gives you things that match the sociology of open source projects: * public home pages * a social network, with prof…

As somebody who uses hosted kiln, finding and reading code on github is so much faster it's not even funny. Every time I go to kiln to look at the blame for a page, I despise it.

The code review tool on kiln is also sub-par compared to the pull-request review tool in github (and boy is it ugly).

Re: Town Car Version Control

#18

Post by tanzam75 »

tjbarbour wrote: post #2

It's good to see FogCreek being practical and adding in Git support, based on how strong they were pushing for Mercurial before (Joel even had an online training[0]) I wouldn't have guessed they would ever switch to Git, but as Joel said "Religious war: averted." I wish more software would mitigate these debates with solutions like this, but its often not that easy. This seems like a cool solution, I don't know if an…

It's because Git has won, in terms of usershare.

Bitbucket, the Mercurial hosting service, now also offers Git. Xen, the first major project to use Mercurial, just switched to Git last month. Microsoft has added Git to Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server.

Whatever Joel's personal source-control preferences were, he has to sell into a world where there are more Git users than Mercurial users.

It's unfortunate, as I preferred Mercurial, but then, Git also comes with some advantages to mitigate the disadvantages. They really were closely-matched. Which is why it was a religious war -- it boiled down to preferences.

Re: Town Car Version Control

#19

Post by tptacek »

ahoyhere wrote: post #16

I can't say I would ever trust my code to a tool written by somebody who thinks that this is a good idea: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-ju... Also, calling Github a "VW Microbus" and implying they're hippie kumbaya love-ins instead of a huge, well-supported tool with the features he implies they lack… well. It stretches credibility.

Wow, what a terrible comment. I'm surprised to have heard it from you. Witch hunts against companies that use language development as a tool; what a weird thing to see voted to the top of an HN thread.

Re: Town Car Version Control

#20

Post by statictype »

ahoyhere wrote: post #16

I can't say I would ever trust my code to a tool written by somebody who thinks that this is a good idea: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-ju... Also, calling Github a "VW Microbus" and implying they're hippie kumbaya love-ins instead of a huge, well-supported tool with the features he implies they lack… well. It stretches credibility.

and implying they're hippie kumbaya love-ins instead of a huge, well-supported tool with the features he implies they lack

I don't see this in the article anywhere. Sounds like you're trying to create controversy where there isn't one.

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