5 ms·

The fact that you had a problem with github quotas isn’t really a problem with git though, is it?

by pja 7y ago

MaulingMonkey 7y ago
The whole reason git lfs exists is to workaround git scalability problems. Its raison d'etre is problems with git. That one of - if not the - most popular tool to solve said git scalability problems, also has scalability problems in practice, is both ironic - and absolutely a problem with the git ecosystem. To be pithy - "Even the workarounds don't work." "Technically", you might say, "that specific symptom with git lfs, and that service provider, isn't the fault of git the command line tool, nor the git protocol". And you would be technically correct - which is the best kind of correct. But I don't think we're referring to either of those particularly specific things with "Git" when we ask the article's question of "Is Git Irreplacable?". I'm already the weirdo for using git the command line tool - most of my peers use alternative git UI clients, and I don't mean gitk. The git protocol is routinely eschewed in favor of zips or tarballs over HTTPS, Dropbox, Sneakernet, you name it - and is invisible enough to not be worth complaining about to pretty much every developer who isn't actively working on the backend of a git client or server. Not to mention it's been extended/replaced with incremental improvements over the years already. So I'm using a slightly broader definition of "git", inclusive of the wider ecosystem, that allows me to credit it for the alternative UI clients that do exist, rather than laughing off the question at face value - as something that has already been replaced.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Not waiting to provide you with free storage is not a "scalability problem". I can't spend company money on Perforce either, is that a Perforce problem?
  - MaulingMonkey 7y ago
    I pay for a github subscription. I set out to pay more for a github quota bump, but found I was limited by upstream's LFS quota rather than my fork's LFS quota.
- pja 7y ago
  Nothing about your problems had anything to do with git & everything to do with the commercial service you were using for your source code hosting. Github the company is not interested in providing you (or anyone else) with free storage for arbitrary data. You were unable to pay for the storage options they do provide because you did not have admin rights to the github account you wanted to work with. None of this is a problem with git, be it GUI git clients or command line ones. This isn’t just "technically correct". It’s the "a commercial company doesn’t have to provide you with a service if they don’t want to" kind of correct.
  - MaulingMonkey 7y ago
    > Nothing about your problems had anything to do with git & everything to do with the commercial service you were using for your source code hosting. All the commercial service providers recommend keeping total repository sizes <1GB or so, and I hear nothing but performance complaints and how much they miss perforce from those who foolishly exceed those limits, even when self hosting on solid hardware - which is 100% the fault, or at least limitation, of git - I believe you'll agree. LFS is a suggested alternative by several commercial service providers, not just one, and seems to be one of the least horrible options with git. You're certainly not suggesting any better alternatives, and I really wish you would, because I would love for them to exist. This results in a second auth system on top of my regular git credentials, recentralization that defeats most of the point of using a DVCS in the first place, and requires a second set of parallel commands to learn, use, and remember. I got tired enough of explaining to others why you have a broken checkout when you clone an LFS repository before installing the LFS extension, that I wrote a FAQ entry somewhere that I could link people. If you don't think these are problems with "git", we must simply agree to disagree, for there will be no reconciling of viewpoints. When I first hit the quota limits, I tried to setup caching. Failing that, I tried setting up a second LFS server and having CI pull blobs from that first when pulling simple incremental commits not touching said blobs. Details escape me this long after the fact - I might've tried to redirect LFS queries to gitlab? After a couple hours of failing to get anywhere with either despite combing through the docs and trying things that looked like they should've worked, then I tried to pay github more money - on top of my existing monthly subscription - as an ugly business-level kludge to solve a technical issue of using more bandwidth than should really have been necessary. When that too failed... now you want to pin the whole problem on github? I must disagree. We can't pin it on the CI provider either - I had trouble convincing git to use an alternative LFS server for globs when fetching upstream, even when testing locally. I've tried gitlab. I've got a bitbucket account and plenty of tales of people trying to scale git on that. I've even got some Microsoft hosted git repositories somewhere. None of them magically scale well. In fact, so far in my experience, github has scaled the least poorly. > Github the company is not interested in providing you (or anyone else) with free storage for arbitrary data. I pay github, and tried to pay github more, and still had trouble. Dispense with this "free storage" strawman. > You were unable to pay for the storage options they do provide because you did not have admin rights to the github account you wanted to work with. To be clear - I was also unable to pay to increase LFS storage on my fork, because they still counted against the original repository. Is this specific workaround for a workaround for a workaround failing, github's fault? Yes. When git and git lfs both failed to solve the problem, github also failed to solve the problem. Don't overgeneralize the one ancedote of a failed github-specific solution, from a whole list of git problems, to being the whole problem and answer and it all being github's fault. > None of this is a problem with git, be it GUI git clients or command line ones. My git gui complaints are a separate issue, which I apparently shouldn't merely summarize for this discussion. Clone https://github.com/rust-lang/rust https://github.com/rust-lang/rust and run your git GUI client of choice on it. git and gitk (ugly, buggy, and featureless though it may be) handle it OK. Source Tree hangs/pauses frequently enough I uninstalled, but not so frequently as to be completely unusable. I think I tried a half dozen other git UI clients, and they all repeatedly hung or showed progress bars for minutes at a time, without ever settling down, when doing basic local use involving local branches and local commits - not interacting with a remote. Presumably due to insufficient lazy evaluation or insufficient caching. And these problems were not unique to that repository either, and occured on decent machines with an SSD for the git UI install and the clone. These performance problems are 100% on those git gui clients. Right? > This isn’t just "technically correct". Then please share how to simply scale git in practice. Answers that include spending money are welcome. I haven't figured it out, and neither has anyone I know. You can awkwardly half-ass it by making a mess with git lfs. Or git annex. Or maybe the third party git lfs dropbox or git bittorrent stuff, if you're willing to install more unverified unreviewed never upstreamed random executables off the internet to maybe solve your problems. I remember using bittorrent over a decade ago for gigs/day of bandwidth, back when I had much less of it to spare. > It’s the "a commercial company doesn’t have to provide you with a service if they don’t want to" kind of correct. If it were one company not providing a specific commercial offering to solve a problem you'd have a point. No companies offering to solve my problem for git to my satisfaction, despite a few offering it for perforce, is what I'd call a git ecosystem problem.

The fact that you had a problem with github quotas isn’t really a problem with git though, is it?

by pja 7y ago

The fact that you had a problem with github quotas isn’t really a problem with git though, is it?

The whole reason git lfs exists is to workaround git scalability problems. Its raison d'etre is problems with git. That one of - if not the - most popular tool to solve said git scalability problems, also has scalability problems in practice, is both ironic - and absolutely a problem with the git ecosystem. To be pithy - "Even the workarounds don't work." "Technically", you might say, "that specific symptom with git lfs, and that service provider, isn't the fault of git the command line tool, nor the git protocol". And you would be technically correct - which is the best kind of correct. But I don't think we're referring to either of those particularly specific things with "Git" when we ask the article's question of "Is Git Irreplacable?". I'm already the weirdo for using git the command line tool - most of my peers use alternative git UI clients, and I don't mean gitk. The git protocol is routinely eschewed in favor of zips or tarballs over HTTPS, Dropbox, Sneakernet, you name it - and is invisible enough to not be worth complaining about to pretty much every developer who isn't actively working on the backend of a git client or server. Not to mention it's been extended/replaced with incremental improvements over the years already. So I'm using a slightly broader definition of "git", inclusive of the wider ecosystem, that allows me to credit it for the alternative UI clients that do exist, rather than laughing off the question at face value - as something that has already been replaced.

icebraining 7y ago
Not waiting to provide you with free storage is not a "scalability problem". I can't spend company money on Perforce either, is that a Perforce problem?
- MaulingMonkey 7y ago
  I pay for a github subscription. I set out to pay more for a github quota bump, but found I was limited by upstream's LFS quota rather than my fork's LFS quota.
pja 7y ago
Nothing about your problems had anything to do with git & everything to do with the commercial service you were using for your source code hosting. Github the company is not interested in providing you (or anyone else) with free storage for arbitrary data. You were unable to pay for the storage options they do provide because you did not have admin rights to the github account you wanted to work with. None of this is a problem with git, be it GUI git clients or command line ones. This isn’t just "technically correct". It’s the "a commercial company doesn’t have to provide you with a service if they don’t want to" kind of correct.
- MaulingMonkey 7y ago
  > Nothing about your problems had anything to do with git & everything to do with the commercial service you were using for your source code hosting. All the commercial service providers recommend keeping total repository sizes <1GB or so, and I hear nothing but performance complaints and how much they miss perforce from those who foolishly exceed those limits, even when self hosting on solid hardware - which is 100% the fault, or at least limitation, of git - I believe you'll agree. LFS is a suggested alternative by several commercial service providers, not just one, and seems to be one of the least horrible options with git. You're certainly not suggesting any better alternatives, and I really wish you would, because I would love for them to exist. This results in a second auth system on top of my regular git credentials, recentralization that defeats most of the point of using a DVCS in the first place, and requires a second set of parallel commands to learn, use, and remember. I got tired enough of explaining to others why you have a broken checkout when you clone an LFS repository before installing the LFS extension, that I wrote a FAQ entry somewhere that I could link people. If you don't think these are problems with "git", we must simply agree to disagree, for there will be no reconciling of viewpoints. When I first hit the quota limits, I tried to setup caching. Failing that, I tried setting up a second LFS server and having CI pull blobs from that first when pulling simple incremental commits not touching said blobs. Details escape me this long after the fact - I might've tried to redirect LFS queries to gitlab? After a couple hours of failing to get anywhere with either despite combing through the docs and trying things that looked like they should've worked, then I tried to pay github more money - on top of my existing monthly subscription - as an ugly business-level kludge to solve a technical issue of using more bandwidth than should really have been necessary. When that too failed... now you want to pin the whole problem on github? I must disagree. We can't pin it on the CI provider either - I had trouble convincing git to use an alternative LFS server for globs when fetching upstream, even when testing locally. I've tried gitlab. I've got a bitbucket account and plenty of tales of people trying to scale git on that. I've even got some Microsoft hosted git repositories somewhere. None of them magically scale well. In fact, so far in my experience, github has scaled the least poorly. > Github the company is not interested in providing you (or anyone else) with free storage for arbitrary data. I pay github, and tried to pay github more, and still had trouble. Dispense with this "free storage" strawman. > You were unable to pay for the storage options they do provide because you did not have admin rights to the github account you wanted to work with. To be clear - I was also unable to pay to increase LFS storage on my fork, because they still counted against the original repository. Is this specific workaround for a workaround for a workaround failing, github's fault? Yes. When git and git lfs both failed to solve the problem, github also failed to solve the problem. Don't overgeneralize the one ancedote of a failed github-specific solution, from a whole list of git problems, to being the whole problem and answer and it all being github's fault. > None of this is a problem with git, be it GUI git clients or command line ones. My git gui complaints are a separate issue, which I apparently shouldn't merely summarize for this discussion. Clone https://github.com/rust-lang/rust https://github.com/rust-lang/rust and run your git GUI client of choice on it. git and gitk (ugly, buggy, and featureless though it may be) handle it OK. Source Tree hangs/pauses frequently enough I uninstalled, but not so frequently as to be completely unusable. I think I tried a half dozen other git UI clients, and they all repeatedly hung or showed progress bars for minutes at a time, without ever settling down, when doing basic local use involving local branches and local commits - not interacting with a remote. Presumably due to insufficient lazy evaluation or insufficient caching. And these problems were not unique to that repository either, and occured on decent machines with an SSD for the git UI install and the clone. These performance problems are 100% on those git gui clients. Right? > This isn’t just "technically correct". Then please share how to simply scale git in practice. Answers that include spending money are welcome. I haven't figured it out, and neither has anyone I know. You can awkwardly half-ass it by making a mess with git lfs. Or git annex. Or maybe the third party git lfs dropbox or git bittorrent stuff, if you're willing to install more unverified unreviewed never upstreamed random executables off the internet to maybe solve your problems. I remember using bittorrent over a decade ago for gigs/day of bandwidth, back when I had much less of it to spare. > It’s the "a commercial company doesn’t have to provide you with a service if they don’t want to" kind of correct. If it were one company not providing a specific commercial offering to solve a problem you'd have a point. No companies offering to solve my problem for git to my satisfaction, despite a few offering it for perforce, is what I'd call a git ecosystem problem.