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Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?

• SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
  I personally think that Fossil is a good example that's extant and used in serious projects. There's that one called pijul which also looks good in theory, but I haven't worked with it. I think version control in general is a little broken before you even get to the software level, but those are two projects tackling some of the problems. And Fossil, I think, is more suited to the scale most people operate on.
• dilawar 3y ago
  git : version control :: vim : editors There is definately scope for a beginner friendly UI/UX. Julia Evans has a post lately about confusing aspect of git. Ability to version control large files (like git-lfs) would be a nice addition.
• stop50 3y ago
  Many tried, few succeded. SVN - client-server principle, but bad at merging branches mercurial - one of the competitors after the linix kernel devs searched a new version control system, its users die out, since git is more popular, very similar to git bazaar - mostly used for ubuntu, since launchpad is only providing bazaar as vcs
  • popey 3y ago
    Launchpad added Git support years ago. Also, bzr pre-dates git by a tiny bit, too. But sadly git won.
• eternityforest 3y ago
  I'm sure we can, the question is, can we make an alternative to GitHub? I wouldn't be surprised if there are already several better ones, but I've never looked, because I already know Git, and my chances of convincing anyone to use a better one seem low, and they rarely seem to have as big of an ecosystem. If it doesn't have multiple clouds providers with pull requests, and at least one of those clouds providers isn't a megacorp, it probably won't be the safe boring choice, unless it's fully P2P. It needs to be packaged in distros, have GUI integrations, etc. Fossil looks really cool, I really like how they integrate the wikis and issues. But I don't know anyone who uses it, and the cloud providers seem to be smaller "Could go away any time" companies. I've never really explored any other VCSes, because none ever seem like they're going to be serious competitors. I'd be more interested in enhancing Git, but it seems a lot of the most interesting git plugins and extensions aren't updated, like GitTorrent.
  • Aachen 3y ago
    > the question is, can we make an alternative to GitHub? I wouldn't be surprised if there are already several better ones, but I've never looked, because I already know Git ¿Que? If you're wondering whether we can make something better than GitHub, there's dozens of git hosting alternatives that you might like better such as Forgejo and GitLab. If you're saying "but I already know git", then there's still dozens of alternative hosting sites or methods!
    • eternityforest 3y ago
      GitHub is the one everyone else uses though, which means you can have everything in one place, so they have the advantage. There are others that are almost as good, I suppose what I should have said is "Can we make something better than GitHub for the hypothetical better non-git VCS", since without that it's hard to imagine using anything but Git.
      • Aachen 3y ago
        Pretty sure alternative git services are still larger than alternative source control systems, yet OP is asking about alternatives to git which will be even smaller. The whole point is that the person wants to use something else. If your argument is that Microsoft GitHub is the largest and therefore the best, it's circular reasoning and will forever remain that way. We should all stay on Facebook also if they're the best because everyone's on Facebook and the network effect has benefits; somehow it seems people have more sense than that and we can actually switch to smaller services which are more aligned with what we want
        • eternityforest 3y ago
          Close to everyone I know is still on Facebook, and I get the impression none of them have any interest in switching, so... I use it too, even though the algorithmic curation stuff is really bad. I could imagine people switching if someone made another site with some kind of killer app and promoted it with a million dollars of ads, but... At the moment, the only feature the alternatives focus on is usually privacy, which is clearly not enough to make average people switch. Network effects aren't the only factor that matters, just a really big one for most.
• pulse7 3y ago
  Of course there is a room for improvement... One of the biggest issues is usability/user experience: pull, fetch, checkout, commit, push, rebase - what is all this and what is the exact meaning? I need simple English terms for my work - like update and save - nothing more. Why do I need to worry about implementation details and terms? If I can not explain it to my wife, then I can not use it for binary documents which she needs to store in a repo... in this case Subversion is a better version-control-system for her documents... Just SVN Update/SVN Commit - nothing more to learn in Subversion...
  • zadokshi 3y ago
    To be honest, I can’t even imagine what you imagine “git save” and “git update” would even do in an alternate universe.
    • retpoline__ 3y ago
      This is funny because in PR oriented development I started treating commits in the same way as "save" in IDE, it's just backup of current state with irrelevant commit message. Everything is described at the end of the work in PR's description and squash merged.
      • from-nibly 3y ago
        But then you can't use blame to look at the current code state. And it also becomes a nightmare to revert your changes.
      • dolni 3y ago
        Giant PRs that are squashed into one commit are an anti-pattern. Every commit should contain exactly one logical change AND a descriptive commit message. Unfortunately a good chunk of the industry doesn't have the discipline to do this. If you have ever worked in a project where there was discipline around committing, you know there is lots of value in doing so (rebasing becomes easier, you unlock the power of bisect, log is actually useful).
• not_your_vase 3y ago
  Yes, there must be a better solution. Git is (usually) better than the alternatives, but it is far from being good. Especially the discoverability of its features is a mess - arcane command line incantations, magic processes. Sometimes only a prayer helps before running the 12th command you found on stackoverflow in desperation. Once you leave the pull-commit-push-merge-rebase circle, you gotta hope that god helps you, because no one else will (or more like no one else can). Unless of course you spend time to learn git, but its complexity is closing up to C++. And using a VCS shouldn't require that amount of effort. It should just get out the way (I must admit, git usually gets out of the way, as long as you use only the base commands... but when it gets in the way, that's when the fun starts)
• rapnie 3y ago
  Jujutsu version control system looks very promising in the way it brings the best of other DVCS'es together and innovates on various concepts. It has been discussed a number of times on HN before. [0] https://github.com/martinvonz/jj https://github.com/martinvonz/jj [1] 4 montsh ago, 261 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36952796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36952796 [2] 2 years ago, 228 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30398662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30398662
  • swah 3y ago
    Surprised this is done in Rust. I could never imagine not doing the v1 of something like this in Python or similar, to be able to change things quickly. Maybe the design was very clear on the person's mind.
    • bryanlarsen 3y ago
      Rust is a fabulous language for refactoring. Strong types and complete matching make it almost completely impossible to miss a spot when making a change
    • dontlaugh 3y ago
      I feel the opposite way. Even though Python is the language I’ve used most, I wouldn’t want to use it for something with a lot of uncertainty and that will suffer many changes. Type systems make it so much easier to change things early on without breaking everything. I’d probably pick F# or similar.
      • gsuuon 3y ago
        There actually is a similar project in F#: https://github.com/ScottArbeit/Grace https://github.com/ScottArbeit/Grace
    • Smaug123 3y ago
      Python certainly lets you change things quickly, because it does not let you automatically enforce any invariants; this is why it lets you get into such extraordinary inconsistent states so easily! I personally could never imagine trying to make a jigsaw out of jelly because "it's v1 and I'll make v2 properly".
• zadokshi 3y ago
  The inner workings of git are not overly complicated. The real problem is git only provides a thin layer on top of the inner workings. It’s not git that needs replacing, (it’s just saving blobs of data) it’s the user interface on top that is confusing. The problem with simplifying the user interface is that abstracting away the complexity is super difficult.
  • Aachen 3y ago
    Git feels a lot like pgp to me: somehow we're not managing to make things simple enough for use by the general public, even when you only need a few buttons and input fields. There's differences, such as that pgp is more complicated under the hood and it being a cryptographic system that needs to be foolproof whereas in git you can nuke and re-clone without data loss most of the time, let alone confidentiality/integrity loss. It just feels very similar in that only expert users properly use it and most people who could make use of it don't bother learning because the interfaces available are such a struggle (beyond basic operations anyway) Whether it can all be solved with a simpler user interface, or whether it would require a simpler underlying system to be able to make simpler standard operations, is where I'm not sure
  • dmos62 3y ago
    Not overly complicated, but super difficult to abstract is somewhat of a contradiction. Maybe the inner workings are complicated, but not complicated to implement right once you understand them.
  • nrclark 3y ago
    Git does have one big architectural problem IMO - native unit of storage is a blob, not a diff. Things like rebase, cherry-pick, 3-way merge, etc would be much easier in a world where the storage model was “diffs” instead of “blobs”. This would have resulted in simpler CLI tools with fewer pitfalls.
    • quickthrower2 3y ago
      I wonder how many horrendously named and located files exist in repositories because people don’t want to fuck with the history.
• retpoline__ 3y ago
  I do believe that it is possible, at least at the API (cli) level. While git is good under the hood, then it has not really user-friendly interface. Also git heavily benefits from GitHub's success, which locks us with git :( I wrote about it here https://trolololo.xyz/github https://trolololo.xyz/github - GitHub is really good, but there's a small problem with that
• omeid2 3y ago
  Yes. From the creators of Sqlite, you got Fossil. One of the most amazing things about Fossil is how you can track the history of a file not just backwards, but also forwards, something which is pretty whacky with git. https://www.fossil-scm.org https://www.fossil-scm.org
  • leschak 3y ago
    100% fossil. there has been a few threads.. and always someone points out edge cases that are only to be solved using git.. well i dont think so. you can actually go into the sqlite db and change stuff. i've recently started playing with its server api to direct user feedback from web to fossils ticketing system. it is just mature and feature packed and i honestly hope it will get as much recognition as sqlite someday.
    • sgbeal 3y ago
      > you can actually go into the sqlite db and change stuff _Nothing_ history-relevant can be changed via manipulation of the Fossil db. In terms of db records, as opposed to space, the db is about 80-90% a transient cache of data which is generated from the remaining (100% immutable) data. Any changes you make to that transient data will be lost the next time that cache is discarded and rebuilt. A longer explanation can be found at: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/fossil-is-not-relational.md https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/fossil-is-not-rela...
      • espe 3y ago
        thanks for the clarification! i'd still be in for a fossil t-shirt :)
• bitwize 3y ago
  Perforce. As for DVCS, the best one I've used is Darcs: https://darcs.net/ https://darcs.net/ There are some sticky wickets (specifically, exponential-time conflict resolution) that hindered its adoption. Thankfully, there's Pijul, which is like Darcs but a) solves that problem; and b) is written in Rust! The perfect DVCS, probably! https://pijul.org/ https://pijul.org/
• jansan 3y ago
  I am not sure if we will ever be able to replace git with anything else. It is so ubiquitous and just "good enough" for most developers, that the pain of switching to a completely new system would far outweight the benefits. Therefore the only solution that I see is a versioning system that is fully backward compatible with git, maybe just a better API layer on top of git. Facebook tried something similar with Sapling. For a new versioning system we do not need twenty different choices. We need one free, open, and solid solution that everybody uses. What the main leaders of the industry should really is to found a groupo that defines that standard. This would be their chance to really make the world a (slightly) better place.
  • mike_d 3y ago
    > It is so ubiquitous It wasn't until 2011 that Subversion dropped below 50% market share in the Eclipse Community Survey. Something new and shiny will come along and replace git.
• mike_d 3y ago
  Subversion was really good. It wasn't perfect, but it was relatively painless. Instead everyone switched to a "distributed" version control system that is such a pain in the ass it is all now hosted by a single company.
  • rglullis 3y ago
    Please, Github is so much more than git hosting. If all it offered was source hosting, no one would care for it.
    • mike_d 3y ago
      Github isn't all git, but all git is Github.
      • dreamcompiler 3y ago
        False. I'm working on two large distributed projects now in git. Neither has anything to do with github.
        • zogrodea 3y ago
          I think the meaning of the sentence you're replying to is that GitHub's features are a superset of Git's features which seems true? "Github isn't all git [some features of GitHub are not in Git], but all git is Github [but all features of Git are in GitHub]." Maybe my interpretation is incorrect?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • sshine 3y ago
    My first job used SVN and it limited workflows compared to git. Branches are more expensive, so people adapt their workflows. I used git-svn on that job, which allowed me to refactor locally; not a feature available to me or others once pushed. My colleagues evaluated git and thought it was too complicated. A few years and a lot of employments later, they’re all using git. I don’t know if it was peer pressure from enough young recruits, but the verdict is clear: git is better than SVN.
• dreamcompiler 3y ago
  Besides the frontend problems with git that everybody talks about, the backend could be improved. It's now line-oriented. It would be more useful if it knew about the semantics of the language you were writing so it could show you semantic differences. That might also provide a mode for binary files which git doesn't handle very well now.
  • arjvik 3y ago
    Actually, it’s not the backend which is line oriented, it’s the front end. The backend doesn’t dissect files, it stores the entire new file when even one line is changed and relies on object compression to find the similarity in the rest.
  • superb_dev 3y ago
    Before we can get a vcs that understand semantic diffs, we need a way to communicate semantic diffs. That way each file type can have its own “semantic differ”. Similar to how language servers help abstract away the differences for IDEs
    • AeroNotix 3y ago
      Y'all know you can change the diff viewer git uses, right?
      • dreamcompiler 3y ago
        Of course. But the diffs are still line-oriented.
        • stop50 3y ago
          You already can change that. Git-lfs already uses this mechanism
        • nemetroid 3y ago
          No, they’re not.
• lionkor 3y ago
  You could probably do better, yes. But if someone is to do better, I'd hope they actually learn git first. A lot of alternative tools come up because of people writing them being unwilling to learn git. There are a handful of concepts and a few handfuls of commands and thats it. And once someone learns git throroughly, they usually come to see that it is actually good enough, and dont bother making something new.
  • groestl 3y ago
    > and dont bother making something new. They don't even bother to add directory tracking ;)
• aulin 3y ago
  No, git is perfectly fine. You just need to study it to master it, just like every other tool we use in our craft.
  • Smaug123 3y ago
    "Fine" is not "optimal". The mere fact that something does the job does not make it the best possible thing that does the job. The most trivial example of a thing that is wrong with Git and which no amount of getting better with the tool can possibly help is "once you generate a conflict, you cannot perform any other versioning operations until you fix the conflict or revert". In particular, for example, you cannot commit a partial resolution of a conflict: you simply have to bail out and try and put your histories in a state that is more acceptable to the merge algorithms before trying again.
    • yencabulator 3y ago
      Maybe you want more local clones (git clone -l -s) or to use worktrees, so you can leave a merge conflict pending in one of them? Git doesn't have a way to "store a partially resolved conflict" in a way that would remember that it hasn't been resolved. If you really want that, maybe you want to just commit the conflict markers and come back later; rebase the commits together once you're all the way done.
      • Smaug123 3y ago
        > Git doesn't have a way to "store a partially resolved conflict" in a way that would remember that it hasn't been resolved. Exactly my point: this is a fundamental limitation of Git for which there is no good workaround. It's not inherent to the domain, but is a limitation of Git. Pijul (for example) considers conflicted states simply to be normal.
        • yencabulator 3y ago
          It's less of a fundamental limitation and more of a thing that hasn't been programmed yet. Feel free to do that.
• bhubert 3y ago
  As far as I can tell, Pijul[0] aims to have better conflict resolution and merge correctness. I'm not super into the theory, so I can't explain it very well, but it looks promising. [0] https://pijul.org/ https://pijul.org/
• bhaak 3y ago
  An obvious area for improvement would be semantic version control. If the VCS would have an understanding of not only what has changed but also how this affects the code, it could deduce a lot if interesting facts about commit blocks. Like ignoring simple refactorings (e.g. renamings), reducing merge conflicts, etc.
• IshKebab 3y ago
  Yes. Here are areas where git sucks: * UX, obviously. * Large files (LFS is a not-very-good poorly integrated hack) * Very large projects (big company codebases). Poor support for sparse/partial checkouts, stateful operations (e.g. git status still scans the whole repo every time on Linux), poor & buggy support for submodules. * Conflict resolution. It's about as basic as it can be. E.g. even zdiff3 doesn't give you quite enough information to resolve some conflicts (you want the diff for the change that introduced the conflict). The diff algorithms are all fast but dumb. Patch based VCS systems (Darcs, Pijul) are apparently better here. IMO the most interesting projects that are trying to solve any of these (but not all of them sadly) are Jujitsu and Pijul.
  • zer00eyz 3y ago
    > The diff algorithms are all fast but dumb. Patch based VCS systems (Darcs, Pijul) are apparently better here. Isnt one of git's core features that it can work as a patch based system? It's my understanding (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that Linux patches can come in via mailing list, as a diff. That would make the person committing different from the owner of the change (also reflected in git's design)? Do Darcs and Pijul just have a string of patches on top of the original source file?
    • IshKebab 3y ago
      Got can apply patches, yes. But I mean when it has two commits (which are snapshots, not patches) and it uses a diff algorithm to synthesise a patch between them. It uses an algorithm which is great from a computer science point of view (low algorithmic complexity, minimal length, etc.) but pretty bad from a semantic point of view (splitting up blocks, etc.). There are a couple of attempts to improve this (DiffSitter, Difftastic) but they don't integrate with GUIs yet.
• tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  It would be hard to get past the network effects. Just like how we are stuck with SMTP, JavaScript, PDF, HTML, etc. The only way I could see it changing is if we have a complete paradigm shift. This is what happened when we went from SVN to Git (centralised to distributed).
  • sneed_chucker 3y ago
    SVN is only 5 years older than git, and while git is distributed, people basically use it like it's a centralized VCS these days.
• tinco 3y ago
  In my opinion the feature Git has always been missing is version control of branches. Of course the immediate consequence would be that you'd be able to roll back changes to branches but there'd be some more fundamental consequences as well. I'm pretty sure some of the problems with GUI's/wrappers around Git break down because there's no tracking of branches/tags. Besides that it's pretty much endgame in my opinion if you consider only the functionality it's meant to solve. If another "better" VCS would ever become popular I feel it would have to be a drastic change to the way of working with VCS, even more drastic than SVN to Git was. There's some cruft in Git that could probably be taken away, and that would make Git better in a theoretical sense, but in the real world that would never happen (unless we get sideswiped by another industry or platform).
  • VoxPelli 3y ago
    Locally there’s a kind of version control for branches in the “git reflog” where you can see how a branch alias has been moved
  • wldlyinaccurate 3y ago
    Can you clarify what you mean by "version control of branches"? Branches in Git are just labels of objects. Are you talking about having a history of which objects a branch has previously labelled, like the reflog?
    • tinco 3y ago
      Yeah, I feel the reflog is more of a tool to do introspection on a git repository than that is a tool for collaboration. It's just something I've felt was missing from Git. If you're looking at the main branch of a repository, what was the previous version of that branch? The way we work around that missing feature is by tagging commits so we don't forget what revision a release was made at for example. A sequence of release tags basically is a meta branch, a history of the release branch, but managed manually instead of through git.
      • dolni 3y ago
• PhilipRoman 3y ago
  Git is great for keeping track of logical history, but personally I find that it is missing tools for handling physical history. Reflog is a step in the right direction but it has a limited size and AFAIK it is not possible to share a reflog between clones. Which leaves "cp -r repo repo.backup" as the best option. Of course, as long as you only do additive changes via commit/merge/revert, the logical history is equivalent to the physical history, but commands like rebase break this model. And despite the flaws of rebase workflows, sometimes it is the best option, like when maintaining a fork. To my surprise Vim actually has something like this - logical history with undo/redo and physical history with g+/g-/:earlier/:later Another thing I would like is some way to "fold" multiple small commits into one bigger one (for display purposes only) as it would let me split large diffs into minimal, self-contained commits while maintaining a reasonable git history.
  • ysofunny 3y ago
    what's the difference between physical history and the logical one? thanks in advance
    • PhilipRoman 3y ago
      The simple explanation: Logical history - what you see when you do "git log --all". Physical history - doing "git log --all" every time a repository updates and then storing each output as an entry into another history log. Kind of a "history of histories" The complex explanation: a git repository at a particular time consists (mostly) of a graph of commits. This graph represents the logical history of code changes in the repository. The graph can be updated in an append-only fashion (using commit/merge/revert) or in a destructive way like with rebase and reset. The physical history is simply the history of the graph over time.
      • ysofunny 3y ago
        in other words the history of the graph is the physical history and the logical history is the filesets which are the nodes in the graph which is the branching sequence of commits the issue is that the 'logical history' is the reason git was built and the 'physical history', seems to me, is only feasible because we have the regular git sequence of commits
• zxt_tzx 3y ago
  I think Git itself is probably too entrenched to be displaced by now, but I recently came across Graphite (https://graphite.dev/ https://graphite.dev/) and, while it’s all still Git under the hood, it abstracts away many of the common pain points (stacking PRs, rebasing) and has nice integrations with GitHub and VS Code.
  • tansan 3y ago
    This is really interesting. Have you tried it before? How do you like it?
    • zxt_tzx 3y ago
      Hey, I have only just started to use it. My colleagues swear by it, which is how I've found out about it in the first place. I think there's no magic and we'll still have to resolve merge conflicts on our own, but my sense is it does simplify repetitive operations. Hope this helps!
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• almostnormal 3y ago
  Something that is better should be able to track moves, not just store state. Moves of files and even partial content moved within (text) files. Unfortunately, that needs a tight coupling to the editor, so I doubt that's going to happen.
• hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  I more or less consider it a solved problem. You're mostly going to hear from people here who are annoyed with Git or otherwise more interested in the topic of version control than the median developer. For me, I think it provides a quite robust and well thought-out set of primitives, and then composes them upwards in ways which are about as good as one can expect. Some stuff obviously isn't well supported. Using the same Git repo to hold large binaries as well as source code is not well supported unless you reach for LFS - that's the biggest downside I see. Fossil would be my next bet. I'm waiting for someone to make an archaeology.co to rival GitHub.com for it.
  • charcircuit 3y ago
    >I think it provides a quite robust and well thought-out set of primitives The existence of the staging area is a poorly thought out part of the design. No other VCS uses it because it was a bad idea that makes the simple case of commuting changes more complicated. >Fossil would be my next bet. I'm waiting for someone to make an archaeology.co to rival GitHub.com for it. Which is exactly why fossil will not be the next big VCS. Ignoring all of the projects on Github add forcing people to move to a less featureful, less integrated, less familial forge just to use a new source control system is a hard sell. The approach of Sapling and Jujutsu where they support the git protocol so that they can be used Github will make them much easier to adopt since it can happen incremenetally and it fully replace git for people.
• dan-robertson 3y ago
  There are already various ways in which mercurial or perforce are better than git, and big companies like Google and Meta have hacked on the systems they started with so much that one can hardly say they’re still perforce/hg. There can be disadvantages there but it seems obvious to me that better systems are possible. It feels to me like the real question is whether GitHub is the endgame.
• countWSS 3y ago
  git could be thousand of times more user-friendly, but its too command-line centric, so workflow is limited to complex "sub tool invocations". GUIs for git exist but they add extreme overhead for simple workflows, perhaps some "standard web interface" backend should be prioritized( Github is popular due their UI). Another alternative is simplifying arcane command invocations, i'd expect "git workflow_commandX file_target" instead of tons of switches and parameters. There should be hundreds of such "standard shortcut commands" to reduce mistakes.
• lordnacho 3y ago
  I'm not sure git is so bad that we need something different. It's certainly awkward at times, but it is also mostly a side-tool: not the thing you think of when you think of being a developer, yet every dev uses it. I suspect most people use just a tiny subset of git day-to-day, and google the rest when it comes up. For this reason, I think if git is replaced, it won't be because whatever comes along will be better objectively, it will be because a few reasons are touted that most people don't understand but are willing to repeat, and some momentum builds behind the alternative.
• deleted 3y ago
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• flir 3y ago
  Don't know about a better solution, but there might be a better interface. My pet theory is that focusing more on the fact that a repo is a directed graph would help. Make the language more graph-like (less "commit" more "node", less "branch" more "path", less "repo" more "graph"). This kind of thinking would, I think, expose a bunch more primitives that should be surfaced more explicitly than they are (lots of things are "possible but not easy" in git), and make it easier to learn for anyone with a math background. And make web searches easier too. (Pretty sure I've said this before and it's been shot down before, so...)
• armchairhacker 3y ago
  Yes, but due to its simplicity + extensibility + widespread adoption, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re still using Git 100+ years from now. The current trend (most popular and IMO likely to succeed) is to make tools (“layers”) which work on top of Git, like more intuitive UI/patterns (https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit, https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless) and smart merge resolvers (https://github.com/Symbolk/IntelliMerge https://github.com/Symbolk/IntelliMerge, https://docs.plasticscm.com/semanticmerge/how-to-configure/semanticmerge-configuration-guide#HowtoconfigurewithGit https://docs.plasticscm.com/semanticmerge/how-to-configure/s...). Git it so flexible, even things that it handles terribly by default, it handles fine with layers: e.g., large binary files via git-lfs (https://git-lfs.com https://git-lfs.com) and merge conflicts in non-textual files by custom merge resolvers like Unity’s (https://flashg.github.io/GitMerge-for-Unity/ https://flashg.github.io/GitMerge-for-Unity/). Perhaps in the future, almost everyone will keep using Git at the core, but have so many layers to make it more intuitive and provide better merges, that what they’re using barely resembles Git at all. This flexibility and the fact that nearly everything is designed for Git and integrates with Git, are why I doubt it’s ever going away. Some alternatives for thought: - pijul (https://pijul.org https://pijul.org), a completely different VCS which allegedly has better merges/rebases. In beta, but I rarely hear about it nowadays and have heard more bad than good. I don’t think we can implement this alternate rebases in Git, but maybe we don’t need to; even after reading the website, I don’t understand why pijul’s merges are better, and in particular I can’t think of a concrete example nor does pijul provide one. - Unison (https://www.unison-lang.org https://www.unison-lang.org). This isn’t a VCS, but a language with a radical approach to code representation: instead of code being text stored in files, code is ASTs referenced by hash and stored in essentially a database. Among other advantages, the main one is that you can rename symbols and they will automatically propagate to dependencies, because the symbols are referenced by their hash instead of their name. I believe this automatic renaming will be common in the future, whether it’s implemented by a layer on top of Git or alternate code representation like Unison (to be clear, Unison’s codebases are designed to work with Git, and the Unison project itself is stored in Git repos). - SVN, the other widespread VCS. Google or ask ChatGPT “Git vs SVN” and you’ll get answers like this (https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/svn-vs-git/ https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/svn-vs-git/, https://stackoverflow.com/a/875 https://stackoverflow.com/a/875). Basically, SVN is easier to understand and handles large files better, Git is decentralized and more popular. But what about the differences which can’t be resolved by layers, like lazygit for intuition and git-lfs for large files? It seems to me like even companies with centralized private repositories use Git, meaning Git will probably win in the long term, but I don’t work at those companies so I don’t really know. - Mercurial and Fossil, the other widespread VCSs. It seems these are more similar to Git and the main differences are in the low-level implementation (https://stackoverflow.com/a/892688 https://stackoverflow.com/a/892688, https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.wiki#:~:text=Both%20Fossil%20and%20Git%20store,emphasis%20on%20the%20entire%20DAG https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.wiki#....). It actually seems like most people prefer Mercurial and Fossil over Git and would use them if they had the same popularity, or at least if they had Git’s popularity and Git had Mercury or Fossil’s. But again, these VCSs are so similar that with layers, you can probably create a Git experience which has their advantages and almost copies their UI.
• thiht 3y ago
  The best feature of Git is that it’s used virtually everywhere. I don’t really care about anything else, I just know I won’t contribute to a repo if it doesn’t use Git.
• DemocracyFTW2 3y ago
  > Or is it a solved problem and Git is the endgame of VCS I've read so many comments to the effect that "X is a solved problem" when it clearly wasn't that I've come to conclude that the phrase means the opposite of its surface value... I'm pretty sure that Git is not the end-of-line as far as VCSs go. Whether I will ever change my VCS, again, ever, that is an entirely different question. I've been through so many of them (RCS; a bit of CVS; a bit of Subversion which promised to be CVS-without-the-flaws, which it was not; Mercurial, because hey it was written in Python, so must be good, right? right?; finally Git; and of course the usual `report-v4-revision-good-one.doc` renaming game; plus a plethora of backup solutions, some really bad ones among them)—so many of them I'd be loathe to switch to yet another one, except maybe Fossil, which I almost did. So yeah, I had totally forgotten about https://fossil-scm.org https://fossil-scm.org ; the reason it didn't become my go-to solution is probably mainly the fault of github.com, which I find too good to be ignored, and I don't want an 'impedance mismatch' between my system and their system. But maybe it would be doable and maybe Fossil is good enough to be worth it; at any rate, go read their docs, especially where they compare themselves directly to Git and give lots of good reasons for their way of doing things. This is the same people who are doing SQLite, so I'd say a trustworthy source of reliably top quality software. Other than that, my personal way of dealing with the complexities of Git is to avoid using parts that I don't need or don't know about well enough (i.e. almost all of it). I use it to check in changes, give one line of comment, and upload to github.com; then of course cloning and updating existing repos as well as setting up a new ones is within my skill set. Branching and merging not so much. So it's like `git` plus `clone`, `add`, `commit`, `push`, that's all; also, I use Sublime Merge for part of these (reviewing changes, adding related changed chunks, commit) which I must recommend for the piece of fine software that it is. I also at some point toyed with gitless (I think it was called) which promised to be Git, but simpler for the simple things and you can always fall back to Git proper where called for; this I find a good proposition that I like (Markdown: fall back to HTML; CoffeeScript: fall back to JavaScript) but somehow gitless didn't stick with me; I guess that's b/c I've already tempered down my usage of Git to a point near absolute zero, and command line history + Sublime Merge does the rest.
  • thfuran 3y ago
    >Mercurial, because hey it was written in Python, so must be good, right? right?; Well, I can't really say that that's why, but yeah. Mercurial's pretty great.
• Apreche 3y ago
  A lot of people these days have just been thrown into the fire with Git as the first and only VCS they’ve ever seen. I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to have used RCS, CVS, SVN, then finally Git. I started using Git super early, before GitHub existed. You may not believe me, but Git was the answer to all my prayers. All those previous systems had fundamental architectural flaws that made them a complete nightmare to use on a team for any serious work. Git has no such problem. There’s nothing it can’t do. Instead, the only limitation is on the user being able to know how to get Git to do what they want it to do. Thankfully, that’s always solvable with a quick read of the documentation or web search. I understand that people might want to make it easier, since the UI is complex, but that’s never going to work. If you abstract away the complexity of the UI, you will necessarily abstract away the power. If you abstract away the power, you are no longer solving all the problems that Git solved. People just don’t realize what problems are being solved because they never lived through those problems with the previous VCSes. You know what’s easier than building a new VCS better than Git? You know what’s easier than using a different VCS from the rest of the world? You know what’s easier than designing a miraculous abstraction on top of Git? Learning Git. Whatever effort you are putting into seeking or building an alternative, instead put that effort towards becoming a Git expert. It will be a lot less effort with a lot more benefit. Trust me on this. It will be well worth it for your career and for your personal computing life as well.
  • bryanlarsen 3y ago
    The git model has fundamental limitations because it saves snapshots rather than changes, and doesn't capture some metadata changes like renames. A tool like Darcs or one of its spiritual descendants will have fewer merge conflicts than git. Totally agree on your main point though. The benefits of switching are far lower than the costs.
    • tehbeard 3y ago
      > ..because it saves snapshots rather than changes.. I might be misremembering the technical details, but isn't that only the case in a git repo with zero pack files? Will grant that the lack of metadata on renames can be issue when a file is heavily refactored alongside it's relocation.
• fragmede 3y ago
  Yes we can. The shortcomings of git are that it doesn't handle binary files well, and you can't clone a slice of a repo. the system after git will handle both of those. mono repo or not is not a question with aftergit because you can clone just a subdir and work there, without the overhead of cloning the whole thing, but also without the weight of keeping up with commits happening outside of your directory.
  • vtbassmatt 3y ago
    Like this? https://github.blog/2020-12-21-get-up-to-speed-with-partial-clone-and-shallow-clone/ https://github.blog/2020-12-21-get-up-to-speed-with-partial-...
    • fragmede 3y ago
      I've seen that. Shallow clones have too many reason to upgrade to a full clone to be totally useful, as well as the additional load on the server it causes. Partial clones don't (yet) let me just checkout a subdir of the repository with the checkout rooted in that subdir.
• yodon 3y ago
  Along what axis do you want the VCS to be "better" than git? For example, git's cli user interface is monstrous (yes, I know, you personally have 800 cli commands memorized and get them all right every time, that doesn't make it "good"). From the outset, the maintainers of git basically decided "it's too much work to make all the cli flags behave and interact consistently" so they didn't. This allowed git to grow fast, at the cost of the cli user experience. That said, git is big enough that multiple companies have come along and "solved" the git UI problem. None of these aftermarket UI layers are perfect, but there are enough of them and they are different enough that you can probably find one that is good enough for you, along whatever axis you personally dislike the git UI (examples include [0], [1], [2], which tackle very different user workflow problems). [0] https://git-fork.com/ https://git-fork.com/ [1] https://graphite.dev/ https://graphite.dev/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7565885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7565885
  • briHass 3y ago
    I generally don't hear too many complaints about GIT in the Windows/.NET development world, probably because there are good UI front ends and there's not as much 'tough guy' cred from sticking to the CLI. Visual Studio does a decent job of abstracting the GIT nuances, but I personally use GIT Extensions, which looks and feels much better on Windows than the other cross platform UIs. I drop to the CLI occasionally, especially for multi step or automated scripts, but you can pry a nice visual commit graph and full featured integrated diff viewer from my dead hands. GIT is powerful and option-laden; the perfect tool for a UI to aide in discoverability. The CLI feels like programming in a text editor vs a real IDE
    • KronisLV 3y ago
      > Visual Studio does a decent job of abstracting the GIT nuances, but I personally use GIT Extensions, which looks and feels much better on Windows than the other cross platform UIs. IDEs and text editors sometimes have nice Git integrations in the UI, but I wanted standalone software that I can use for anything from various programming projects, to something like gamedev projects (with Git LFS) or arbitrary documents. In the end, I just forked over some money for GitKraken, it's pretty good, especially with multiple accounts on the same platforms, when you want to switch between them easily: https://www.gitkraken.com/ https://www.gitkraken.com/ There's also Sourcetree which I used before then, kind of sluggish but feature complete: https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/ https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/ For something more lightweight, I also enjoyed Git Cola on various OSes: https://git-cola.github.io/ https://git-cola.github.io/ Even Git documentation has a page on the software out there, a good deal of which is free and has good platform support: https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis Quite frankly, I spend like 90% of the time using a GUI interface nowadays, when I want to easily merge things, or include very specific code blocks across multiple files in a commit, or handle most of the other common operations. Of course, sometimes there's a need to drop down to the CLI, but you're right that some GUI software feels like it actually improves the usability here.
• dv35z 3y ago
  What do you recommend for non-programmers, who would still benefit from version control system. Examples: - Book author using markdown / static site generator to publish a book. Uses visual editors like Typora. - Product designers for open-source hardware. Various design files, SVG etc. I’ve experimented with a “GUI only” git flow - just to see what is possible, so I could introduce the concept to others. I found GitHub desktop app (https://desktop.github.com/)did https://desktop.github.com/)did a great job of visually showing git flows and functions, but for a non-tech/programmming person, the tool would be daunting. Curiosity what your suggested tech stack would be - sans Terminal…
  • mbfg 3y ago
    i'd probably recommend Mercurial, say a UI like TortoiseHq. It has 90% of the value of git with a much better interface.
  • quickthrower2 3y ago
    Github? You can edit and commit online. You probably don’t need to ever branch or merge
• itsafarqueue 3y ago
  Fossil by sqlite think so as does Sapling by Facebook https://sapling-scm.com https://sapling-scm.com
• lttlrck 3y ago
  The only thing I wish git handled better out of the box, with without any flags/setup, is large/binary assets. LFS is ok but it still feels like a kludge to me. The cli does not bother me, there are many tools that offer alternatives/overlays/UIs. Not saying it is perfect or even good, but it's good enough - for me at least.
  • fargle 3y ago
    exactly right! lfs is "kinda okay?" at best. i just wish binary support was just part of git natively. honestly keeping the large binaries as loose objects would be fine except for performance. which should be something that could be improved with cow filesystems (lfs does use this, but limited by what git's implementation can support) or it may be enough to incrementally improve lfs, i do see that ssh support is showing up which might help a little. need to do something about smudge/clean filters too, which would require new support in git itself.
• ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  Have heard of some FAANG (meta, google..) moving to Mercurial. Any merit in that?
  • alexhornby 3y ago
    yep both extended it and have versions that can work against GitHub/git servers. sapling scm from meta has I think the best cli and VS code UX https://sapling-scm.com/ https://sapling-scm.com/ jj from google is also mercurial derived with very similar cli features like histedit and has support for deferring conflict resolution https://github.com/martinvonz/jj https://github.com/martinvonz/jj
    • martinvonz 3y ago
      To clarify, jj is not derived from Mercurial, but it's heavily inspired by it. The current DVCS solution at Google (called Fig) is based on Mercurial, however. But we're hoping to replace it by jj.
• aaomidi 3y ago
  Yes. IMHO the next VCS model should follow a centralized-first, decentralized optional model. Which would be a flip of the decentralized-first model of git. I also think GitHub is in a unique space to really innovate on git and it’s a shame they’re not. For example, I shouldn’t need to make a fork to make a PR. That’s absurd and the GitHub server should be able to apply ACLs based on the push identity. There’s a couple more of these suggestions I can think of, but yeah, GitHub should do more in this space.
  • vtbassmatt 3y ago
    I think there are some serious ergonomic issues with forks as they’re presently implemented. However, I’m curious what you intend from: > the GitHub server should be able to apply ACLs based on the push identity That’s essentially exactly what a GitHub fork _is_ – an ACL’d set of refs you’re allowed to control, separate from upstream’s set of refs. I guess – what would you have us do differently? Disclosure, I work for GitHub and am the product manager for Git stuff.
    • aaomidi 3y ago
      Oh awesome, thank you for asking for clarification! What really slows me down, and honestly just kinda annoys me is that when I’ve cloned some upstream repository onto my machine and made a bug fix, why do I need to then fork the repository once more and push the commit to my fork first and then go through the theatrics of making a PR? GitHub the server could, for example, fake my branch on the origin/upstream. It doesn’t need to actually make the branch on the upstream, and can smartly make a volatile fork, and prepare the changes to become a PR. Basically, since the server knows my identity, and knows if I can or can’t make a branch on the upstream repo, it can handle the boilerplate of making a fork for me. What I want to see from GitHub is embracing the power of there being an authoritative server between the developer and the repository.
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• tasubotadas 3y ago
  Yes. Take a look at Mercurial
• sebastianconcpt 3y ago
  Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15206339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15206339
• stevenjgarner 3y ago
  My experience is that the power of any technology unfolds gradually - with git it's like okay let's master the commands for a single repository on a single server for a single user up to a certain level of adequacy. Then (depending on need), let's add multiple repositories on the same single server for the same single user. Then add multiple servers (including a git remote server). Then add multiple users ... etc ... of course the magic of git is you can unfold those needs in any sequence. Often when I find I do not understand something (that I thought I understood), I go back in scope to an earlier unfolding, eliminating other factors. I'm sure git can be improved, but I think the biggest improvement comes from the user being improved with their understanding of the scope of capabilities. I have yet to see a good tutorial on this (among the plethora of git tutorials out there). This reminds me of the (excellent) video where the "Harvard Professor Explains Algorithms in 5 Levels of Difficulty" [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkIvmfqX-t0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkIvmfqX-t0 I would love to see a Channel where that is the entire theme - explaining everything in 5 levels of difficulty. All this being said, at each of the "5 levels of difficulty" of git, are there improvements to be made. I'm sure there are. It would be good to focus the answer on each of those levels.
• TheCondor 3y ago
  Yes, it will be superseded. Will the new thing be “better?” I guess that depends on the metric and needs. “ls” was done but exa/eza came along and they have users. Pondering it, most of the easy things I can think about are really workflow issues on top of git. Git doesn’t exactly enforce them all though so maybe tighter integration would be a reason to change from git if it could not be adapted. Short of that, it’s hard to imagine that a new generation of engineers simply won’t do a new thing to do a new thing; there will be a “git considered harmful” article or a “modern” replacement for git.
• m3047 3y ago
  Really depends on "what". I use a wiki which internally uses RCS, but you never see it. The only reason I even know is that I needed to scan older versions of some assets and it was straightforward compared to what you'd expect with Git. (Other bonus, attachments and meta pages are stored as actual files. With a little bit of code you can cobble together an automated page builder for e.g. physical assets.) I consider rsync --link-dest a version control system.
• mbfg 3y ago
  Maybe there are certain domains where you could obviously do better. Take an artist wanting to version control images, i could imagine specialized tools that could be much better. For programming, there could be improvements for versioning groups of repositories that work together perhaps. For standard needs, probably going to be difficult.
• gschoeni 3y ago
  We've been working on a data version control system called "oxen" optimized for large unstructured datasets that we are seeing more and more with the advent of many of the generative AI techniques. Many of these datasets have many many images, videos, audio files, text as well as structured tabular datasets that git or git-lfs just falls flat on. Would love anyone to kick the tires on it and let us know what you think: https://github.com/Oxen-AI/oxen-release https://github.com/Oxen-AI/oxen-release The commands are mirrored after git so it is easy to learn, but optimized under the hood for larger datasets.
• dietr1ch 3y ago
  Yes, I think that we can do better than plain text as the source of truth, and thus git would probably need to change. There's work around a bunch of languages that are not based on text, some have their own editor or a tool to manage a canonical representation in text for you that would make them friendlier to git. - https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/main/README.md
• lgkk 3y ago
  I’ve worked with git since 2016. I guess I must not be a power user because beyond using like six got commands I’ve never had any issues or felt like man my workflow is interrupted. What features do you think need to be improved? From a purely UX pov I think git is probably the best software I’ve used. It just works.
• mhh__ 3y ago
  Git has problems but is mostly alright, cli aside. Git as practiced by GitHub and gitlab is awful quite a lot of the time.
• gardenhedge 3y ago
  I feel like git is poorly thought out. If a group of dedicated smart people set out to build a version control system, I doubt they would end up with git.
• Vaslo 3y ago
  I think the nomenclature could have been better, and less technical people would use it. Calling it commit when it’s essentially a save is good start . Yes I know it isn’t exactly the same as saving but who cares.
• brudgers 3y ago
  To me, "Could there be something better than git?" is not the important question. What matters is if git is good enough. Or more specifically, is if git good enough for X when X is something that is actually being done. I mean, git is good enough for my very minimal needs and the needs of people with much more sophisticated needs than mine (e.g. the Linux team). And since I know more about git than any other VCS (in part because there are better resources for learning git than any other VCS) learning another VCS for the sake of learning another VCS wouldn't help me get anything done. None of that means git is good enough for your needs, but statistically, it probably is good enough for your needs because statistically, most difficulties with git are related to training and knowledge since the mathematics underpinning git are (to the best of my understanding) sound. Which also implies (not accidentally) that being better than git requires better resources for learning the new VCS than git has, and that's a very tall order. Good luck.
• wetpaws 3y ago
  [dead]
• zubairq 3y ago
  I think git has become the standard now. I used git as the reference point when I had to implement a custom version control system for a product . Also many things can be built on top of git, like GitHub for instance
• erik_seaberg 3y ago
  The prevalence of squashing is a symptom of some kind of problem, and we need a less permanently destructive solution.
• screye 3y ago
  I remember a post on HN about how YAML was a terrible serialization format. A stricter subset of YAML (eg - StrictYaml) wouldve solved every single problem mentioned there. Similarly, the solution to git is a subset of git (strict git). Gits problem is that it is too powerful and assumes that it's users are all git experts. You should be able to run git in 'easy-mode'. Add, commit, checkout new branch, revert, squash merge. That's all 90% of people need. Then the intermediate folks can run it in mode 2, adding the ability to rebase, reset heads, cherry pick, revert, stash etc. This covers the next 9%. The last 1% can use it in mode 3 for the rest. Once you take away the fear of what you could break, git becomes far less intimidating.
• friend_and_foe 3y ago
  I think we already have that, Fossil. Unfortunately network effects are a bitch to overcome. But with Fossil you get an elegantly architectured system that includes a ton of forge tools the absence of which have led to centralization of git repositories in places like github. It's simpler, saner, smaller and more capable.
• foreigner 3y ago
  IMO Git's central enabling technology was disk space getting so cheap you could afford to have a copy of the entire repository and all it's history locally. I'm not sure what the next iteration of that would be... maybe always-on networking, so you're constantly consuming changes from all collaborators without having to manually pull them? What useful things could we do with that information?
• gavinhoward 3y ago
  Disclamer: I'm working on it. But yes, I think we can. Almost everything can be better: * Merges/rebase/branch management. * Project management. * Diff. * Large files. * User management. * Partial checkouts. * ACID semantics. * Binary file management. * User experience, including making it accessible to non-technical folks. * A bunch of others.
  • pdimitar 3y ago
    Semantic diffs would be a very long overdue, and a very welcome, change.
    • gavinhoward 3y ago
      I agree. The hard part about it is that it's different for every language, so to support it for a language, you have to implement diff for that language. I'm hoping to make money off of companies wanting those languages.
• sliq 3y ago
  Yes! In my bubble, we just need "code snapshots" or versioning, but not for the whole repo, more for each function / file. It's surprisingly hard to get juniors into git, there are so many crazy situations all the time.
  • mmis1000 3y ago
    The fact that a git commit is literally a code snapshot... Hey, git don't even store diffs at first place. All it store is the snapshot of all directory content. The diff git showed to you is actually generated on the fly. You can even just clone a single commit and get the content out of it if you are doing ci and don't need the complete history.
• mihaic 3y ago
  I first user Git about 10 years ago, going from Accurev and Perforce. Those VCSs were a bit heavy to configure, but their UI allowed a lot of complex and easy workflows to happen at the same time. Git won by being free and since a lot of people think using the terminal is somehow better, but we could have done a lot better in terms of UX and power. Command line programs force you to have a lot of context in your mind, and if git would have been designed with a UI it would have been probably better for everyone. I still hope for better tools, but they'll probably be based on Git, just with better default flows.
• gcau 3y ago
  I want something simpler than git, with less features, less commands, but far easier to use and covers 99% of use cases, preferably a GUI. (No, simple git guis do not exist.)
• tkuraku 3y ago
  Got works great. The main pain point for me is largr binary files. There is git LFS, but it isn't default and takes some configuration.
• v3ss0n 3y ago
  Mercurial and Facebook's sapling is much better than git in developer exp wise. Git is broken in many places but it become standard just because GitHub popularity and rise in development community that love to take whatever big orgs spoon feed them. Common developers these days don't like to spend time researching things that won't make quick bucks easily.
• Leftium 3y ago
  Theo describes how Graphite was built on top of git (and Github) to improve DX: https://youtu.be/I88z3zX3lMY https://youtu.be/I88z3zX3lMY The main innovations seem to be: - The concept of a "stack" which is somewhere between a commit and a branch, a group of commits. - Better UI, especially for Github notifications. The end result is he feels safer using advanced git features and can move faster, especially when working within a team of multiple devs.
  • yencabulator 3y ago
    > - The concept of a "stack" which is somewhere between a commit and a branch, a group of commits. That seems to be just some conventions for branch naming & rebasing. The most value seems to be in Graphite syncing that state into Github PRs. It says a lot about these people (e.g. narrator of this video) that they think this is something novel. The Linux kernel community has done "stacked commits" even before Git existed.. Unless it's about webdev & on youtube, it doesn't exist?
• arein3 3y ago
  Git is perfect, it just needs a good UI. The best UI in my opinion is sourcetree, which is not available on linux. I worked with sourcetree years ago (switched to linux last years and used smartgit client), I don't know the current state, but old versions are available to download, and don't require an atlassian account. Some improvements I could suggest are the ability to ammend a commit which is not the last (and not pushed of course). Currently if you want to ammend the third last commit for example, you have to soft reset last commit, push it to stash, reset the new last commit again and push it to stash, ammend the changes, then pop the previous 2 stashes and commit them one by one. This could be easily automated.
• estiaan 3y ago
  Different perspective: We absolutely can do better than git… for non-text files that can’t be merged or stored as a sequence of diffs I (briefly) looked into using git as an alternative to PDM for solidworks CAD files and it turns out git is absolutely not a good fit for this use case. Not surprisingly, I mean it wasn’t designed for that at all. Point remains though that the world needs a better version control system, something like git, but that works with non text files, because boy do the actual solutions I’ve tried suck compared to the git experience Software engineers are so lucky to have such a powerful tool for free, mechanical engineers or their companies pay tens of thousands of dollars for version control software that is far worse PDM is a bit more than just version control but the version control is what my company wants and it’s so painful
• JonChesterfield 3y ago
  Git views the codebase as mutable. It's really well set up for changing the historical record to reflect how you wish it had been done. This is necessary for large team dev efforts - it means the history is mostly a sequence of atomic changes to functionality or code structure, with some reverts when CI judged the patch inadequate. Fossil views the historical record as immutable. Your sequences of mistakes, iteration, failed experiments are all diligently recorded. I like that, means I get to revisit missteps and abandoned branches later. However it is clearly a scaling hazard. I don't want to see the incremental hacking around of a thousand other people. Nor would I want to prohibit that sort of exploration. My personal work is in fossil repos, going back a decade across various operating systems and versions of fossil. It has literally never let me down.
• alexecldn 3y ago
  I’ve used CVS, SVN, Arch, and Git. The main benefit of Git seems to be performance and atomicity. Arch was garbage. CVS works on files rather than directories. Git is a bit or a lot faster than SVN. That said, Git is much slower when there are large files in your repo. Git is much harder to use than SVN. Particularly you see engineers struggling with resolving conflicts. One benefit of Git was decentralization, but now Git is Github, it is centralized again. Builds, IDE, programming languages should be 1st-class citizens. I don’t want to wrestle with .gitattributes or .gitignore. What would I make better? - Fast with large files. - Simpler. - Improved commit meta-data.
• sngz 3y ago
  Yes, its called mercurial
• JohnFen 3y ago
  I hope so! After years of using git, I'm come to the opinion that it's far from a great solution. Arguably, it's not as good as some of the vcs it replaced. Hopefully, something better will be coming in the future.
• CrimsonCape 3y ago
  Git is the product of an engineer, not a designer. Whereas engineers glue the parts together and make them work, the designer looks at the parts and questions if they are polished as to the intent and the logic. I think git escaped to the public before having a designer's refinement. Users need to learn about the glue and speak the glue language to git to make it work.
• Aperocky 3y ago
  There's a sweet spot between simplicity, feature and usability. I think git exist right in the middle with a little bit of learning curve. A lot of proposal in this thread would have improved one of these at huge detriment of others.
• softwaredoug 3y ago
  I bet we probably could But you could also do better than Linux or OSX as an OS, but the mindshare and industry investment there is so strong, moving to a new thing is a monumental undertaking
• a-saleh 3y ago
  Solved is a strong word. For most people, especially with git-forges geing so popular, yes. But if you are doing binaries, because you are an artist/do 3d modeling, you probably sill use svn. And I am still checking in on https://pijul.org/ https://pijul.org/ from time to time