Comment by forrestthewoods
1 day ago
Git is fundamentally broken and bad. Almost all projects are defacto centralized. Your project is not Linux.
A good version control system would support petabyte scale history and terabyte scale clones via sparse virtual filesystem.
Git’s design is just bad for almost all projects that aren’t Linux.
(I know this will get downvoted. But most modern programmers have never used anything but Git and so they don’t realize their tool is actually quite bad! It’s a shame.)
> A good version control system would support petabyte scale history and terabyte scale clones via sparse virtual filesystem.
I like this idea in principle but I always wonder what that would look in practice, outside a FAANG company: How do you ensure the virtual file system works equally well on all platforms, without root access, possibly even inside containers? How do you ensure it's fast? What do you do in case of network errors?
NFS server not responding. Still trying...
Tom Lyon: NFS Must Die! From NLUUG 2024:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVF_djcccKc
>Why NFS must die, and how to get Beyond FIle Sharing in the cloud.
Slides:
https://nluug.nl/bestanden/presentaties/2024-05-21-tom-lyon-...
Eminent Sun alumnus says NFS must die:
https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/06/17/eminent-sun-alumnus-sa...
Someone just needs to do. Numerous companies have built their own cross-platform VFS layers. It’s hard but not intractable.
Re network errors. How many things break when GitHub is down? Quite a lot! This isn’t particularly special. Prefetch and clone are the same operation.
Yeah we're at the CVS stage where everyone uses it because everyone uses it.
But most people don't need most of its features and many people need features it doesn't have.
If you look up git worktrees, you'll find a lot of blog articles referring to worktrees as a "secret weapon" or similar. So git's secret weapon is a mode that lets you work around the ugliness of branches. This suggests that many people would be better suited by an SCM that isn't branch-based.
It's nice having the full history offline. But the scaling problems force people to adopt a workflow where they have a large number of small git repos instead of keeping the history of related things together. I think there are better designs out there for the typical open source project.
Git now has artificial feet to aim the foot guns at so they hit the right target.
I don't understand what you mean by "the ugliness of branches".
In my experience, branches are totally awesome. Worktrees make branches even more awesome because they let me check out multiple branches at once to separate directories.
The only way it could get better is if it somehow gains the ability to check out the same branch to multiple different directories at once.
> ability to check out the same branch to multiple different directories at once.
So you want shared object storage, but separate branch metadata. That's git clone with hardlinks, which is what Git does locally by default.
1 reply →
Completely disagree. Git is fundamentally functional and good. All projects are local and decentralized, and any "centralization" is in fact just git hosting services, of which there are many options which are not even mutually exclusive.
Got works fine and is solid and well enough known to be a reasonable choice for most people.
But I encourage everyone to try out a few alternatives (and adopt their workflows at least for a while). I have no idea if you have or not.
But fine has never used the alternatives, one doesn’t really know just how nice things can be. Or, even if you still find fit to be your preferred can, having an alternative experience can open you to other possibilities and ways of working.
Just like everyone should try a couple of different programming languages or editors or anything else for size. You may not end up choosing it, but seeing the possibilities and different ways of thinking is a very good thing.
Yeah, the decentralized design is incredibly useful in the day-to-day, for ~any project size.
Incorrect. All the features you think are associated with the D in DVCS are perfectly accessible to a more centralized tool.
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Are you missing the central hosting services provide a good backup plan for your locally hosted git?
I agree! They are excellent git backup services. I use several of them: github, codeberg, gitlab, sourcehut. I can easily set up remotes to push to all of them at once. I also have copies of my important repositories on all my personal computers, including my phone.
This is only possible because git is decentralized. Claiming that git is centralized is complete falsehood.