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Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

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Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#41

Post by kstrauser »

rhabarba wrote: post #26
l0b0 wrote: post #22

It is necessary but not sufficient for any new contender to do at least the following to have any chance of taking over: - Interoperate with the major player(s), currently Git and in many places unfortunately still Subversion. svn2git probably did more for Git adoption than any other feature or tool, because it allowed a fairly painless transition without losing information. - Solve at least one big problem with the…

> unfortunately still Subversion Which is a better choice than Git for most projects, to be honest.

Everyone's has their own tastes and preferences, of course, and I respect that yours is different than mine. That said, I used and loved CVS and then SVN for years and didn't get why all the kids were fussing around with this new Git thing. I finally made myself try it for about a week. At the end of that experiment, I ported all my repos from SVN to Git and quickly set to purging all Subversion-related knowledge from my brain. There's literally nothing about SVN that I prefer to Git, other than its UI was a little more pleasant.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#42

Post by emodendroket »

ken wrote: post #29
emodendroket wrote: post #13

I am happy to use whatever everyone else starts using, provided it works at least as well. But I also do not have many problems that git won't solve, so I don't feel a burning need to switch. I think git is good enough that source control is no longer a very interesting problem.

But did you think that RCS, CVS, or SVN were also good enough? Or is this new?

When I started developing the options people were taking seriously were Mercurial and git. At first I was using mercurial, but since everyone else was using git I switched to that. So those are the only ones I've seriously used.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#43

Post by Skunkleton »

dickjocke wrote: post #37
ken wrote: post #19

Every version control system that's become dominant in my lifetime became popular because it fixed a major obvious flaw in the previous dominant system (RCS, CVS, SVN). From where I sit, Git has a couple obvious flaws, and I expect its successor will be the one that fixes one of them. The most obvious (and probably easiest) is the monorepo/polyrepo dichotomy.

Can you explain more about that? I've worked with both and I feel like monorepo is kinda a pain, but I dont understand where Git fits in to either directly. Seems like it just snapshots files.

In this context "monorepo" means a huge repository with many many revisions. Git has several well documented deficiencies in this scenario. See [1] for microsoft's experiences with git.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-o...

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#44

Post by rurp »

I really doubt Git is going anywhere for the foreseeable future, but I could imagine a more approachable VCS catching on. Git is extremely opaque to most new developers and even for experienced devs looking up a new command. Sometimes I look up how to perform an unfamiliar task with Git and find 4-5 competing answers on Stackoverflow with no real clear explanation of why one is better than another.

If an easier VCS caught on enough to be used in schools and boot camps, many younger devs would start with that one and just keep using it as they progress in their career. The new VCS wouldn't have to be better or more powerful, just easier to use for the basic stuff that makes up 95% of Git usage, in order to gain traction. That said, Git works perfectly fine and is so entrenched that I don't see it going anywhere.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#45

Post by richardwhiuk »

hn_acc_1 wrote: post #38
ken wrote: post #19

Every version control system that's become dominant in my lifetime became popular because it fixed a major obvious flaw in the previous dominant system (RCS, CVS, SVN). From where I sit, Git has a couple obvious flaws, and I expect its successor will be the one that fixes one of them. The most obvious (and probably easiest) is the monorepo/polyrepo dichotomy.

I don't see any obvious flaws with Git. The monorepo/polyrepo discussion exists apart from your choice of version control system and has little to do with Git, as far as I can tell

That's true, but it's possible to imagine a system superior to git solving this in someway, in the same way that git solves distributed merges.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#46

Post by zestyping »

pbiggar wrote: post #36

I'm working on a git replacement, in a way. The thing that makes git powerful is that its just text. Git is probably the most powerful thing for code as text. When code no longer is just text (and by "text" I mean bytes on disk, not that we're switching to coding with emoji or VR) you get to do more powerful stuff. Our plan in Dark ( https://darklang.com ) is to combine all the different ways that people "branch" (de…

Sounds intriguing! Can you say more about what that single concept is and how it works?

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#47

Post by bno1 »

hn_acc_1 wrote: post #38
ken wrote: post #19

Every version control system that's become dominant in my lifetime became popular because it fixed a major obvious flaw in the previous dominant system (RCS, CVS, SVN). From where I sit, Git has a couple obvious flaws, and I expect its successor will be the one that fixes one of them. The most obvious (and probably easiest) is the monorepo/polyrepo dichotomy.

I don't see any obvious flaws with Git. The monorepo/polyrepo discussion exists apart from your choice of version control system and has little to do with Git, as far as I can tell

Maybe it's time for a version control system to come up and fix a problem no one knew they had.

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#48

Post by comex »

Git's biggest flaw is that it doesn't scale. If a new system can fix that without sacrificing any of Git's benefits, I think it can topple Git.

It's ironic that Git was popularized in the same era as monorepos, yet Git is a poor fit for monorepos. There have been some attempts to work around this. Google's `repo` command is a wrapper around Git that treats a set of smaller repos like one big one, but it's a (very) leaky abstraction. Microsoft's GVFS is a promising attempt to truly scale Git to giant repos, but it's developed as an addon rather than a core part of Git, and so far it only works on Windows (with macOS support in development). GVFS arguably has the potential to become an ubiquitous part of the Git experience, someday... but it probably won't.

Git also has trouble with large files. The situation is better these days, as most people have seemingly standardized on git-lfs (over its older competitor git-annex), and it works pretty well. Nevertheless, it feels like a hack that "large" files have to be managed using a completely different system from normal files, one which (again) is not a core part of Git.

There exist version control systems that do scale well to large repos and large files, but all the ones I've heard of have other disadvantages compared to Git. For example, they're not decentralized, or they're not as lightning-fast as Git is in smaller repos, or they're harder to use. That's why I think there's room for a future competitor!

(Fossil is not that competitor. From what I've heard, it neither scales well nor matches Git in performance for small repos, unfortunately.)

Re: Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019)

#49

Post by wtetzner »

krasin wrote: post #20
dustingetz wrote: post #12

The cloud is going to change a lot of stuff, file-system based code might be gone, code-in-database is already halfway here ... opportunity

I agree with the first half of the statement: we indeed do not have a cloud-first version control system. It could bring some real benefits of tight integration with continuous build and other things considered to be essentials nowadays. I don't see files going anywhere. I would like to listen to examples of "code-in-database is already halfway here", if you happen to have them.

Of course, you could probably build some pretty convenient cloud-syncing tech on top of Git without a ton of effort.
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