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Ask HN: Would more apps build with Git back-end if there’d be a solid SDK?

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Ask HN: Would more apps build with Git back-end if there’d be a solid SDK?

#1

Post by hannes_paul »

Hi HN,

we are building a git-based localization solution (https://github.com/inlang/inlang) and we are wondering why there’s not more apps making use of git as their back-end.

Building on git has a bunch of advantages that are much harder to replicate with different architectures (automations, version control, minimal integration management etc) but very few projects use git to its full potential.

Right now building on git is full of tedious workarounds but do you think people would use a git-based architecture for more projects if there was a solid SDK to build with?

Re: Ask HN: Would more apps build with Git back-end if there’d be a solid SDK?

#3

Post by hannes_paul »

PaulWaldman wrote: post #2

Can you provide a few examples of apps you have in mind? Are you indicating a service would fetch files from git based on user requests?

Oh I see how that was unclear. I don't mean using git as a database for user requests, but git as a back-end for collaborative applications. For example, in our case, translators and devs have to collaborate to achieve localization. Normally translators would work in some isolated cloud application and then data pipelines between said application and the git repo are built. But why doesn't the translator facing app just build directly on git? Then editing the translation strings would happen on the git repo and there would be no synching between two sources of truth (git-repo and cloud solution)

Re: Ask HN: Would more apps build with Git back-end if there’d be a solid SDK?

#4

Post by threesevenths »

Have you seen [libgit2](https://libgit2.org/) and the csharp libgit2sharp? Both seem to be reasonable albeit low level interfaces to a repo.

My opinion is that you’ll still desire some other data store for indexing and searching as your application grows.

Re: Ask HN: Would more apps build with Git back-end if there’d be a solid SDK?

#5

Post by billconan »

I used to build a blog engine using git as the storage. As a result, my blog users can view their update histories and also collaborate on a post through a pull request like process.

behind the scenes , I used libgit2. By default, libgit2 uses the filesystem as storage backend, which is more difficult to scale than a database.

You can replace the default backend with your own database backend, but it seems to require lots of work.

If there was a solid SDK built for the above cloud use case, things could be easier for me.

Re: Ask HN: Would more apps build with Git back-end if there’d be a solid SDK?

#6

Post by billconan »

hannes_paul wrote: post #3
PaulWaldman wrote: post #2

Can you provide a few examples of apps you have in mind? Are you indicating a service would fetch files from git based on user requests?

Oh I see how that was unclear. I don't mean using git as a database for user requests, but git as a back-end for collaborative applications. For example, in our case, translators and devs have to collaborate to achieve localization. Normally translators would work in some isolated cloud application and then data pipelines between said application and the git repo are built. But why doesn't the translator facing app j…

I think asking translators to use git is a hard sell.

Re: Ask HN: Would more apps build with Git back-end if there’d be a solid SDK?

#8

Post by intelVISA »

billconan wrote: post #6
hannes_paul wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I see how that was unclear. I don't mean using git as a database for user requests, but git as a back-end for collaborative applications. For example, in our case, translators and devs have to collaborate to achieve localization. Normally translators would work in some isolated cloud application and then data pipelines between said application and the git repo are built. But why doesn't the translator facing app j…

I think asking translators to use git is a hard sell.

Its dirty core could be hidden behind some pastel colored buttons perhaps

Re: Ask HN: Would more apps build with Git back-end if there’d be a solid SDK?

#9

Post by borplk »

If you elaborate on specific use cases that will be useful.

git as a DB I think is not that useful. I'd guess in most cases you'd be better off with sqlite.

regarding the collaboration use-case I think it's also not that interesting outside of the usual code stuff.

Maybe some git-inspired features can be made such as diffs or merge requests but I don't think you'd neccessarily need the real git for that.

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