Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 71 posts

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#51

Post by jdboyd »

vog wrote: post #17
thaumaturgy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it funny to think about how, if Tridge hadn't done what he did, if all of Linus' public shaming of Tridge had done the trick and the Linux kernel had stayed on Bitkeeper, that we wouldn't have had git, or Github? Linus did a good job of coming up with a replacement tool in a hurry, but I'm also grateful to Tridge for poking a stick into the hornets' nest.

We would still have had Darcs [1]. An without its competitors Git and Mercurial, maybe Darcs would have gotten more enthusiasts pushing Darcs to where Git is today. [1] http://darcs.net/

I tried using darcs for awhile before I ever touched git. What made me initially switch was that darcs is non-trivial to install if you can't use a package manager (say because policy doesn't allow you to). After that, what really sold me on git was that git had much nicer integration with svn. I no longer use svn, but it was important at the jobs I had while I was getting started with dvcs in general.

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#52

Post by Sevein »

ciupicri wrote: post #45
ontouchstart wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am running git on a jailbroken 3G iPad 1 during commute. :)

Yeah, but what's the purpose? Are you editing text files (source code) on the iPad and you need to keep track of the changes?

Some people do! Textastic for example seems like a nice editor and you can always plug in a keyboard in an iPad.

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#53

Post by [deleted] »

luriel wrote: post #37
markokocic wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Darcs was pretty neat at the time, especially since it was the only open DVCS. And the theory behind it was interesting to read. The only problem is that it had a feeling of non-robustness when using it, and because of that I was tempted to have multiple copies of my repos, just in case of corruption. And that kinda defeats the purpose of VCS. Then, git came along. Although a bit strange in the beginning, especially…

> Darcs was pretty neat at the time, especially since it was the only open DVCS. You are forgetting Tom Lord's arch, which had a really bizarre interface (even more so than Darcs), but was conceptually very nice.

[deleted]

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#54

Post by fusiongyro »

kzrdude wrote: post #43
humbledrone wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, is "being easy to statically compile" some benchmark for simplicity that I've never heard of? Also, what do you care if git is 230MB? Do they even make thumb drives that small any more?

a 230MB executable is no fun.. it needs to be read from disk to be executed, and bigger code means worse cache use (for instructions) when running.

It's 115 links to a 2 MB executable. The actual on-disk size is 2 MB.

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#55

Post by luckydude »

ramses0 wrote: post #49
voltagex_ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any particular threads worth digging up?

I ran into McVoy on reddit a few years ago. He seemed totally different than the "scary evil public persona" that has been bandied about... http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9zdlf/git_and_m... ...humble, concerned, and proud of how they've advanced the "state of the art" and his company's contributions to modern version control. """Imagine how I'd feel if Linus used BK for years and when moving off he made…

Well, to be fair to the people pushing the "scary evil public persona", I don't come across well in email. Never have.

I'm better in person; had a meeting with a guy from Germany a couple of years back who worked up the courage to invite himself to our offices in the south bay and after a couple of beers he made some comment like "wow, you're nothing like what I expected, you're actually a nice guy".

I get that a lot. It's a "gift" :)

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#56

Post by ontouchstart »

ciupicri wrote: post #45
ontouchstart wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am running git on a jailbroken 3G iPad 1 during commute. :)

Yeah, but what's the purpose? Are you editing text files (source code) on the iPad and you need to keep track of the changes?

Push to github :-)

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#57

Post by ramses0 »

luckydude wrote: post #55
ramses0 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran into McVoy on reddit a few years ago. He seemed totally different than the "scary evil public persona" that has been bandied about... http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9zdlf/git_and_m... ...humble, concerned, and proud of how they've advanced the "state of the art" and his company's contributions to modern version control. """Imagine how I'd feel if Linus used BK for years and when moving off he made…

Well, to be fair to the people pushing the "scary evil public persona", I don't come across well in email. Never have. I'm better in person; had a meeting with a guy from Germany a couple of years back who worked up the courage to invite himself to our offices in the south bay and after a couple of beers he made some comment like "wow, you're nothing like what I expected, you're actually a nice guy". I get that a lot…

Good to see you again! Hopefully business is still going well for you, although I imagine GitHub enterprise is becoming a strong competitor (and noticeably Git is left off the comparisons page?).

From what I can tell maybe age and experience have mellowed you out your email tone a bit... pretty soon you'll turn into Ned from The Simpsons. ;-)

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#59

Post by luckydude »

ramses0 wrote: post #57
luckydude wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair to the people pushing the "scary evil public persona", I don't come across well in email. Never have. I'm better in person; had a meeting with a guy from Germany a couple of years back who worked up the courage to invite himself to our offices in the south bay and after a couple of beers he made some comment like "wow, you're nothing like what I expected, you're actually a nice guy". I get that a lot…

Good to see you again! Hopefully business is still going well for you, although I imagine GitHub enterprise is becoming a strong competitor (and noticeably Git is left off the comparisons page?). From what I can tell maybe age and experience have mellowed you out your email tone a bit... pretty soon you'll turn into Ned from The Simpsons. ;-)

Well, our website sucks eggs. I used to maintain it, then we hired a supposed sales/marketing guy and he stripped out all the screenshots and removed anything that actually gave you information and replaced it with a bunch of gobbly gook that is supposed to resonate with the fully buzz word enabled manager types. And then he left "to spend time with his family" :)

I've been too disgusted with the result to actually fix it but it clearly needs some lovin. I don't suppose anybody wants to tackle marketing BitKeeper? Not a fun job given that we annoyed the open source crowd but we do have some neat technology.

Github is in a different space, we don't see them much. We do see git of course, but lucky for us some of the design decisions in git left us some advantages (see the facebook thread about 6 months ago).

I dunno about Ned, isn't he the religious guy? I'm more the grumpy old man :)

Re: Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

#60

Post by to3m »

ciupicri wrote: post #31
vidarh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Besides, file sizes of statically linked version control binaries is utterly uninteresting for anyone with an ounce of sanity. Unless, you, say, want to be able to use it on an embedded device for some reason, or to be able to ship it as part of some project where you have little control over what environment users might want to run it in, say for an IDE running on Android. Or for ports to far more constrained plat…

Why would/do you run git on a mobile device?

You could use it to automatically get firmware and software updates. One likely way of doing it: use git to list out tags and branches, find most recent one with appropriate text in the name. Then check out the data from that revision, and use it. Maybe delete the local git stuff afterwards (since you don't need it any more). Or, better yet, archive the data from that revision.

You might not necessarily supply this solution as part of a product - but if you work somewhere that has a lot of devices to manage, you might want to do this kind of thing yourself, internally. And if you're going to then take it seriously, you'd want to keep previous revisions of all your stuff around, making it easy for you to roll back to previous versions. Files with history, and easy rolling back to previous revisions... git isn't the worst possible way of doing that.

(I've seen this sort of thing done with perforce, pretty much exactly as I describe, to deliver updates of internal tools and manage test builds of products. Daily builds of tools and products get checked in to perforce each day; most days, QA test that day's build results; if a a given day's build proves not to be a big pile of crap, they tag the corresponding revision. Then you can use perforce to find half-decent historical builds, and retrieve them. The place I saw this done at had a little tool that somebody had written to put a friendly GUI face on this process.)

Post reply on HN