Comment by trashb
2 days ago
> The old model assumed one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow. Not only has the problem not been solved well for that old model, it’s now only been compounded with our new AI tools.
A bit of a strange thing to say in my book. Git isn't SVN and I think these problems are already solved with git. I agree that the interface is not always very intuitive but Git has the infrastructure which is very much focused on supporting alternatives to "one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow".
> the problem that Git has solved for the last 20 years is overdue for a redesign.
To me it's not clear what the problem is that would require a redesign.
The problem is how to make money from something that is more or less solved.
BitKeeper tried to do that. Git was built because the commercial license of BitKeeper became unworkable for the Linux kernel community.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".
>Git was built because the commercial license of BitKeeper became unworkable for the Linux kernel community.
BitKeeper was free to linux kernel developers with a "but no reverse engineering" clause, but Tridgell went exploring of his own volition because he wanted to and kinda sorta violated that, so the license was cancelled by BitKeeper.
I'm not taking sides or upset about any part of this, I just wouldn't call that "becoming unworkable for the linux kernel community"; that would be like "the fence around your yard became unworkable for me in my desire to trespass on your property so I climbed over it"
what Tridgell discovered was pretty dumb and could be considered a distinct lack of a fence, but he connected to a socket and typed "help" and it dutifully printed out a bunch of undocumented useful commands.
Yep, something that is sadly becoming more and more common. People with solutions spending insane money trying to convince others that a problem exists.
It's basically the entire context of this website.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say these guys would never have raised if they didn't have "GitHub co-founder" on the first slide of the pitch deck
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The beauty of it all is one doesn’t even have to invent a solution… they only have to invent a “problem” to be pitched for VC funding.
have you heard startups
As a spoon designer, I have had some difficulty finding work lately.
It’s not solved because it’s trash. There’s no good interface for it and people find it difficult to use.
Skill issue. It's the most popular VCS in the world by a huge margin, millions of devs use it every day just fine, countless forges have been built around it, and there's only one semi-compelling alternative frontend (jj). If you honestly find Git challenging, how are you coping with software engineering? Git is the easy part.
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> To me it's not clear what the problem is that would require a redesign.
The interface is still bad. Teaching people to use git is still obnoxious because it's arcane. It's like 1e AD&D. It does everything it might need to, but it feels like every aspect of it is bespoke.
It's also relatively difficult to make certain corrections. Did you ever accidentally commit something that contains a secret that can't be in the repository? Well, you might want to throw that entire repository away and restore it from a backup before the offending commit because it's so difficult to fix and guarantee that it's not hiding in there somewhere and while also not breaking something else.
It's also taken over 10 years to address the SHA-1 limitation, and it's still not complete. It's a little astonishing that it was written so focused on SHA-1 never being a problem that it's taken this long to keep the same basic design and just allow a different hashing algorithm.
> Well, you might want to throw that entire repository away and restore it from a backup before the offending commit because it's so difficult to fix and guarantee that it's not hiding in there somewhere and while also not breaking something else.
I'm not a git expert but I cant image that's true
Of course is not true - look into git filter branch. I had to use it once when a developer checked in a whole bunch of binaries and created a PR which ended being merged. I had to rewrite the history and delete the files from history - just deleting the files would not suffice because the file were in git history and we’re taking too m&ch space.
It’s not you just need to force push or generate a new key…
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The interface can be independent of the implementation. Under the hood git does everything you need. If learning to use it at a low level isnt appealing, then you can put an interface on top which is more ergonomic.
I'm a huge fan of lazygit
> Under the hood git does everything you need
No it doesn't. Git is buggy. It also doesn't work for anything that's not a text file. It is unbelievably slow.
> Did you ever accidentally commit something that contains a secret that can't be in the repository?
What do I need to do on top of a git force push, and some well documented remote reflog/gc cleanup, which I can’t find with a single search/LLM request? Are we there, where we don’t have enough developers who can do this without feeling it as a burden? Or are we there where this level of basic logic is not needed to implement anything production ready?
> What do I need to do on top of a git force push, and some well documented remote reflog/gc cleanup, which I can’t find with a single search/LLM request?
This is a self-defeating argument. You're essentially saying we shouldn't improve something because it can be done with a handful of commands (you already know btw) and prompting an LLM.
> Are we there, where we don’t have enough developers who can do this without feeling it as a burden?
The no true scotman.
> Or are we there where this level of basic logic is not needed to implement anything production ready?
Not sure how this fits in with the rest honestly.
It was never about whether it was possible. It was about how it's being done. Juniors (and even seniors) accidentally check in secrets. Arguing that there shouldn't be a simpler way to remove an enormous security flaw feels a bit disingenuous.
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git rebase -i <one commit before your mistake> git push origin mainline -f
git log --all --reflog -- path/to/secret-file
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More power to them for re-visiting this, but agree with you:
> The old model assumed one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow.
That sounds exactly like the pre-git model that git solved..
I've always wanted a kind of broader and more integrated approach that isn't just about text diffs. the ability to link in substantial comments that would be displayed optionally and not piss off linear readers. links to design and reference documents. bugs and prs that were persistent and linked to the versioned code instead of being ephemeral.
think about all of the discussion we have around the code that gets lost. we certainly have the ability to keep and link all that stuff now. we don't really need to have arguments about squashing or not, we can just keep the fine grained commits if you really want to dig into them and maybe ask that people write a comprehensive summary of the changes in a patch set -in addition-.
but I guess none of that has anythig to do with AI
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