4 ms·

I don't think diffs are the "natural" object - if you talk to someone who isn't using an automated version control system but still doing revision control, what

by geofft 6y ago

I don't think diffs are the "natural" object - if you talk to someone who isn't using an automated version control system but still doing revision control, what they have is "Resume 12-1-2020.doc," "Resume 12-2-2020.doc," "Resume reviewed by Joe.doc," "Resume for Contoso final.doc," "Resume for Contoso final final USE THIS VERSION.doc," etc. Those are snapshots of individual versions of the files, not diffs. Or think about your favorite wiki (Wikipedia or your corporate wiki) - if you hit the "History" page, what you see is a list of the versions of the page, and then some UI to compare any two given versions. While there's a button for computing a diff between any version and the previous, that's not what it appears to treat as the natural object. Diffs are an emergent object when you have some mechanism to automatically create them and apply them. (This is generally a programmatic mechanism, but there have long been cases where the mechanism is manual effort - think laws that amend other laws by saying "After section 3 insert... and remove section 5".) But the ultimate goal is to produce a version of the file. If you want a diff management system, play around with quilt, which treats diffs (patch files) as the first-class object. Just about everyone I know who's tried using quilt for more than the tiniest amount of work vastly prefers just importing the applied patches into git and working with them in git. This is largely because quilt is empirically much more leaky - it's very sensitive to the current state of your directory, because a diff is a second-class object which requires something to be applied to in order to make sense, and it's too easy for the contents of your directory to not quite line up. (Put another way - there's a reason we call it "version control" / "revision control". The thing it tracks is versions/revisions, which are concrete instances of the file in time. Quilt is a patch management system, and very few people are interested in those.)

oblio 6y ago
You're right but I think what you're describing the absolute bare minimum of version control. Yes, people want to ostensibly see the different versions/states. But for anything past the simplest setups, they immediately want to see changes, since you're actually after change management, not version control. Viewing different versions scales very poorly. Even regular user oriented tools such Word offer "Track changes", which is a diff view. Wikipedia also has a "Compare versions" button quite prominently on the page you mention. If anything, most users I've exposed even to simple diff tools immediately appreciate the value. It's just that mainstream tools rarely support diffing since it's very complex from a technical point of view (end user tools and apps rarely work with plain text, they use binary formats, marked up text, etc), so it's not a mainstream paradigm as a result, and people are less familiar with it.
pmeunier 6y ago
All the arguments you give are based on shortcomings of the tools: Microsoft Word doesn't have version control, Wikipedia stores versions in a database. > But the ultimate goal is to produce a version of the file. The fact that the end result is a version doesn't mean versions should be the main object. If you add a semicolon to a file, the actions you do are "press the ; key", not "create an entire version from scratch that has a semicolon there". > If you want a diff management system, play around with quilt You're doing it again! Why pick the least suitable tools for the jobs? Quilt is not a patch-based version control system, Pijul and Darcs are.

by geofft 6y ago

oblio 6y ago

You're right but I think what you're describing the absolute bare minimum of version control. Yes, people want to ostensibly see the different versions/states. But for anything past the simplest setups, they immediately want to see changes, since you're actually after change management, not version control. Viewing different versions scales very poorly. Even regular user oriented tools such Word offer "Track changes", which is a diff view. Wikipedia also has a "Compare versions" button quite prominently on the page you mention. If anything, most users I've exposed even to simple diff tools immediately appreciate the value. It's just that mainstream tools rarely support diffing since it's very complex from a technical point of view (end user tools and apps rarely work with plain text, they use binary formats, marked up text, etc), so it's not a mainstream paradigm as a result, and people are less familiar with it.

pmeunier 6y ago

All the arguments you give are based on shortcomings of the tools: Microsoft Word doesn't have version control, Wikipedia stores versions in a database. > But the ultimate goal is to produce a version of the file. The fact that the end result is a version doesn't mean versions should be the main object. If you add a semicolon to a file, the actions you do are "press the ; key", not "create an entire version from scratch that has a semicolon there". > If you want a diff management system, play around with quilt You're doing it again! Why pick the least suitable tools for the jobs? Quilt is not a patch-based version control system, Pijul and Darcs are.