A Git story: Not so fun this time
A Git story: Not so fun this time
What will be the next to replace Git? Many say it might be related to AI, but no one can say for sure.
Now here is a sentence that would make me immediately stop reading the article. Thankfully it is at the end, since it was a great and interesting read.
But now I wonder, the article does mention that Git has some core design problems. Are there any new emerging VCSs that iterate on the idea and are better (or faster, or have an unique idea about how to handle stuff), or is version control basically a solved problem with Git?
- Pijul: patch-based like Darcs but apparently solves its performance issues. In theory this improves conflict resolution.
- Jujutsu: kind of an alternative front-end to a git repo (but not a front-end to git). Has some different ideas, like no staging area (draft commit), and some other stuff I can't remember.
- Sapling: from Facebook. Unfortunately only part of it is available. The server is not public yet (I guess it's tired up in Facebook infrastructure too much).
And it's definitely not a solved problem. Aside from the obvious UX disaster, Git has some big issues:
- Monorepo support is relatively poor, especially on Mac and Linux.
- Submodule support is extremely buggy and has particularly bad UX even for Git.
- Support for large files via LFS is tacked on and half-arsed.
- Conflict resolution is very very dumb. I think there are third party efforts to improve this.
I think the biggest issue is dealing with very large code bases, like the code for a mid-large size company. You either go with a monorepo and deal with slowness, Windows-only optimisations and bare minimum partial checkout support.
Or you go with submodules and then you have even bigger problems. Honestly I'm not sure there's really an answer for this with Git currently.
It's not hard to imagine how this might work better. For instance if Git repos were relocatable, so trees were relative to some directory, then submodules could be added to a repo natively just by adding the commits and specifying the relative location. (Git subtree almost does this but again it's a tacked on third party solution which doesn't integrate well, like LFS.)
Aside from the obvious UX disaster, Git has some big issues:
I find this blend of claims amusing. I've been using Git for years on end, with Git LFS and rebase-heavy user flows, and for some odd reason I never managed to stumble upon these so-called "disasters". Odd.
What I do stumble upon are mild annoyances, such as having to deal with conflicts when reordering commits, or the occasional submodule hiccup because it was misused as a replacement for a package manager when it really shouldn't, but I would not call any of these "disasters". The only gripe I have with Git is the lack of a command to split a past commit into two consecutive commits (a reverse of a squash commit), specially when I accidentally bundled changes to multiple files that shouldn't have been bundled. It's nothing an interactive rebase doesn't solve, but it's multiple steps that could be one.
Can you point out what is the most disastrous disaster you can possibly conceive about Git? Just to have a clear idea where that hyperbole lies.
I think the biggest issue is dealing with very large code bases, like the code for a mid-large size company. You either go with a monorepo and deal with slowness, Windows-only optimizations and bare minimum partial checkout support.
Or you go with submodules and then you have even bigger problems. Honestly I’m not sure there’s really an answer for this with Git currently.
The partial checkout support in Git is getting improved. Take a look, maybe it now solves your problems.
Support for large repositories via
scalarworks also for Linux (though not everything is ported; as main body of work on supporting large repositories was created to deal with the size of MS Windows repository, it started with Windows-only support / optimization first).There are alternatives to submodules, like https://github.com/chronoxor/gil
It felt like the wild west for a while because there were so many open problems and each implementation seemed to be focusing on a subset of them. Git handles all of them with decent enough speed that there isn't much incentive to go against the grain.
I think Git is good enough and so ubiquitous that we won't see a competitor until coding itself drastically changes shape. Who knows what that will look like, but if it's not collections of relatively flat files then Git may someday be replaced.
On the other hand, git has major issues with binary content, such as when making games. I know there is Plastic, which has some cool features, especially in regards to merging, but when Unity bought it, it got stuck in unreasonable overpriced proprietary licensing hell. Is there some kind of FOSS VCS that solves similar issues?
Quite elaborate but also very interesting read on git and version control history.
I don't get the title. Why is it "A Git story: Not so fun this time"? What is not so fun time referring to?
I think it refers to two things: the title of the book about how Linus create Linux "Just for Fun. The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary", and the fact that Git had to be created to continue effective work on Linux kernel (after BitKeeper fiasco).
From the start of the article:
Linus Torvalds once wrote in a book that he created Linux just for fun, but it ended up sparking a revolution. Git, his second major creation, also an accidental revolution.