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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

#111

Post by sasham »

gumby wrote: post #60

It's about time someone revisited & reimagined version control. the previous generations each lasted about 15 years: SCCS/RCS -> CVS -> Bitbucket/git/mercurial -> ??? so I am glad to see this. I would start by talking about what is great about Diversion -- what it lets you do that you couldn't before. Since you mention gaming and perforce I looked in vain to see if it supports binaries (a major limitation of git -- j…

Thanks for the feedback! Totally agree. Diversion does support binaries, should have mentioned it directly (will update the website).

The thought behind cloud native is that workloads and devtools and data are moving there, and we want Diversion to be the best choice for when everything is in the cloud. Besides that cloud storage and DBs allow us to build and iterate much faster, and worry less about scalability, data distribution & storage etc.

But we can also run Diversion locally / in a container, it just won't be as scalable.

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

#112

Post by plagiarist »

swells34 wrote: post #107
sbergot wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your information you can use the reflog command to find the previous head commit and restore your branch. It takes 10 minutes and then you learn to disable force pushing on the main branch.

I find it funny how many comments in this angry rebuttal section actually endorse a Git replacement.

It's an interesting new application of that joke, "when I have a question on Linux I use a sock puppet account to leave an obviously wrong answer which prompts dozens of corrections."

I'm trying to imagine how to generalize this to other products. I think if I state the competing product has negative feature X, but also intentionally get some details confidently incorrect or deliberately feign incompetence, you get a group of people confirming X.

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

#113

Post by gnarlouse »

dartos wrote: post #49
sasham wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! We're definitely not trying to bash Git, it's done a lot of good for software development and for sure is going to continue evolving. Git had much more edge when it was competing vs SVN and other centralized VCSs. With 10Mb networks (if you were in office) you could feel physical pain when committing stuff > Reg how Git is not perfect in the cloud world - check out GitHub's blog post here about their cloud de…

> We're definitely not trying to bash Git Using git with bash is the best way to use git (:

Came here to make a similar joke

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

#114

Post by spacecrafter3d »

sasham wrote: post #97
spacecrafter3d wrote: post #83

This looks really cool! Well done! Definitely looking into this for my startup. Currently we use a mix of Git and Perforce, but Perforce is a pain to maintain and very difficult for the non-coder on our team to work with for art assets. When we started I looked at Plastic SCM (owned by Unity)—looks like it targets a similar use case to Diversion. I honestly can’t remember why I moved away from it—I think it was the l…

Thanks!! What do you work on?

[Skyglass](https://www.skyglass.com), real-time Hollywood VFX on mobile.

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

#115

Post by darrenf »

egaldv wrote: post #99
darrenf wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An example use case is game studios having repos with very large histories (hundreds of GiBs and more) where the tip is significantly smaller. Having the entire repo history on your local machine might be infeasible, and usually unnecessary. Being able to get just the tip and get the rest via API calls solves this. "Being able to get just the tip" is `git clone --depth 1`, isn't it?

And then you lose functionality, for example `git blame` depends on the history being available locally. If you want a working repository with all the source control features you need a regular clone. That's where "being able to get the rest via API calls..." kicks in :)

OK so `git clone --filter=blob:none`, then. That downloads the tip and commit history, but no historic blobs. `git blame` then works by downloading missing blobs on demand, which doesn't sound too different to making an API call.

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

#116

Post by oblio »

osigurdson wrote: post #95

>> most notably in games development, semiconductors and financial services are still using legacy tools like SVN and Perforce I think this should be your elevator pitch. Don't focus too much on "git complexity" as most people already know git so it just creates an argument. Scalability, in terms of numbers of users is somewhat hard to argue as well (Linux kernel has 1000s of contributors). However, it is completely…

> Don't focus too much on "git complexity" as most people already know git so it just creates an argument.

I'd say this phrase is both right and wrong.

It's right in the sense that it creates an argument.

It's wrong in that it creates an argument with the peanut gallery of git experts. But guess what, most people using git are not experts. They're software developers who don't want to learn the intricacies of git (probably most software developers out there), they're software development adjacent folks (think data scientists, etc) who for sure don't want to learn the intricacies of git, etc.

The "common person" using git will most likely resonate on the "git complexity" argument.

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

#117

Post by monsieurbanana »

pmontra wrote: post #110

As this is a startup the competitors are GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab etc. and not the underlying technology. That is a mean to a goal, making money or most probably a lucrative exit. > [git] was built for [...] much smaller projects, It was built for the Linux kernel. There are larger projects than that but how many? Of course if you manage to make them switch to Diversion and get paid for that you could be well off ev…

I agree that the "project size" argument doesn't make much sense, however size as in file size does. There are multiple methods to add support for large binary files in git, but none are great.

With their focus on game developers, I imagine that's one of the primary use cases.

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

#118

Post by computershit »

gavinhoward wrote: post #102

Disclaimer: I am designing a Git alternative too. Maybe "cloud native" will have a pull for game companies, but I am not so sure. I think a lot of studios would want to self-host. "Git compatible" is an interesting phrase; does Diversion use the same type of backing store? If so, I am not so sure it will handle large files as well as hoped. I had to solve this problem myself, and I did, but it required a different st…

> Maybe "cloud native" will have a pull for game companies, but I am not so sure. I think a lot of studios would want to self-host.

Cloud native and self-hosting are not mutually exclusive.

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

#119

Post by oblio »

meibo wrote: post #51

Being deceptive about Git's shortcomings is going to raise eyebrows with anyone seriously evaluating your solution, which is already going to raise eyebrows because it's not free software. Most studios will try to avoid locking themselves into another expensive, annoying VCS that they have no control over. There's good attempts at FOSS p4 replacements now, you need to do better if you want to stand out.

> Being deceptive about Git's shortcomings

Are they being deceptive? I'm not sure I see it.

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

#120

Post by oblio »

gumby wrote: post #60

It's about time someone revisited & reimagined version control. the previous generations each lasted about 15 years: SCCS/RCS -> CVS -> Bitbucket/git/mercurial -> ??? so I am glad to see this. I would start by talking about what is great about Diversion -- what it lets you do that you couldn't before. Since you mention gaming and perforce I looked in vain to see if it supports binaries (a major limitation of git -- j…

> SCCS/RCS -> CVS -> Bitbucket/git/mercurial

You skipped Subversion/SourceForge. People forget but for about 5 if not 10 years, SVN was the biggest SCM in town, next to P4, P4 having more of a hold in the game dev world.

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