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Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client

engineering.fb.com

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Re: Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client

#231

Post by tambourine_man »

Shish2k wrote: post #185
tambourine_man wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>get all the benefits of being PHP-like without the drawbacks of being PHP-compatible I have a hard time understanding the benefit of using a language that’s almost like a very popular one, but not quite.

PHP has some benefits to its design that the vast majority of other languages don’t — deployment is as simple as “stick a .php file on in your website folder”, hitting the “refresh” button gets you the latest code with no “build” or “restart server” step, it’s all stateless shared-nothing so you won’t have data from one request changing the behaviour of another request, etc. But the implementation has a lot of drawba…

Yes I’m well aware of the problems. I just seems to me that being PHP-like but incompatible is much more confusing than useful.

Re: Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client

#232

Post by MBCook »

softwaredoug wrote: post #22

Its interesting how these threads about Git simultaneously have (a) People arguing git is fine, and shouldn't be simplified (b) People arguing about the right way to use git, and flame wars about best git workflows I mean most people simply see (b) and conclude "this is a huge hassle, I don't want to annoy some git-workflow-purist, I'm just going to walk on eggshells on this tool and hope I don't break anything" It's…

You missed my problem with these threads.

(c) Git is a disaster that has destroyed source control for 15+ years and the industry is unable to recover from due to Stockholm syndrome

It’s impossible to discuss source control without people coming out of the woodwork to shit on git. It doesn’t work right. It’s too hard. SVN was better. Mercurial should have won. Blah blah blah.

Git isn’t perfect. And the command line has improved (I don’t care much, I use a GUI).

But the number of people who seem to insist that because it doesn’t work for them or they don’t personally like it it’s horrible and everyone should abandon it is crazy.

And it makes trying to read/participate in discussions like this painful.

Re: Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client

#235

Post by waynesonfire »

Shish2k wrote: post #211
sixstringtheory wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point, but it is not clear to me that Sapling is better than Git. I haven’t seen anything in its docs or in the comments here where I haven’t thought of a way to do it with Git. I wonder what the cost benefit analysis would be: how many developers hours have been expended building Sapling so far, vs a list of things it can do that Git cannot. And I guess it bears repeating that I’m interested in possibility and…

Given that they’re both open source and can be customised using turing-complete languages, the only limit to possibilities is how much effort you’re willing to put into customising them. Even CVS has the possibility of working as a distrubuted system if you wrap it up in enough layers of hacky shell scripts ;) Having done quite a bit with both mercurial (which the sapling CLI is based on) and git, I find that the mer…

The last thing I want to do is learn a new source control tool. For this to occur, it truly needs to be 10x better and not because someone isn't motivated enough to read the manual.

With how well git has worked for me, I suspect I'll use it for the rest of my career.

Re: Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client

#237

Post by waynesonfire »

I just cannot understand how a CTO approves this type of project. Imagine running a company and some engineer comes in and and says they want to develop a new source control system. I don't understand under what circumstances this is approved. Is it a pet project for a 10x engineer and it's allowed just to keep them on board?

There are projects, like Apache Hadoop, that are open-sourced because they're an open-source answer to an extremely powerful, successful, commercial product. Sapling is nothing like this. The reason it's being open-sourced is because Meta considers it tech debt and I'm not surprised.

Re: Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client

#239

Post by hu3 »

waynesonfire wrote: post #237

I just cannot understand how a CTO approves this type of project. Imagine running a company and some engineer comes in and and says they want to develop a new source control system. I don't understand under what circumstances this is approved. Is it a pet project for a 10x engineer and it's allowed just to keep them on board? There are projects, like Apache Hadoop, that are open-sourced because they're an open-source…

> The reason it's being open-sourced, unsurprisingly, is because Meta considers it tech debt.

I understand the sentiment and my suspicion is similar. Do you have a source?

Re: Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client

#240

Post by arxanas »

dcow wrote: post #238

What exactly does “git compatible” mean? I may have missed it, but didn't see it skimming the post.

You can push and pull directly from Git repositories, without resorting to some kind of tedious intermediate conversion step. Note that they don't support co-locating in the same repository at present, i.e. running both `sl` and `git` commands in the same directory.
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