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Git is fundamentally broken and bad. Almost all projects are defacto centralized. Your project is not Linux. A good version control system would support petaby

Git is fundamentally broken and bad. Almost all projects are defacto centralized. Your project is not Linux. A good version control system would support petabyte scale history and terabyte scale clones via sparse virtual filesystem. Git’s design is just bad for almost all projects that aren’t Linux. (I know this will get downvoted. But most modern programmers have never used anything but Git and so they don’t realize their tool is actually quite bad! It’s a shame.)

matheusmoreira 1y ago
Completely disagree. Git is fundamentally functional and good. All projects are local and decentralized, and any "centralization" is in fact just git hosting services, of which there are many options which are not even mutually exclusive.
- the_arun 1y ago
  Are you missing the central hosting services provide a good backup plan for your locally hosted git?
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago
    I agree! They are excellent git backup services. I use several of them: github, codeberg, gitlab, sourcehut. I can easily set up remotes to push to all of them at once. I also have copies of my important repositories on all my personal computers, including my phone. This is only possible because git is decentralized. Claiming that git is centralized is complete falsehood.
- compiler-guy 1y ago
  Got works fine and is solid and well enough known to be a reasonable choice for most people. But I encourage everyone to try out a few alternatives (and adopt their workflows at least for a while). I have no idea if you have or not. But fine has never used the alternatives, one doesn’t really know just how nice things can be. Or, even if you still find fit to be your preferred can, having an alternative experience can open you to other possibilities and ways of working. Just like everyone should try a couple of different programming languages or editors or anything else for size. You may not end up choosing it, but seeing the possibilities and different ways of thinking is a very good thing.
- ItsHarper 1y ago
  Yeah, the decentralized design is incredibly useful in the day-to-day, for ~any project size.
  - forrestthewoods 1y ago
    Incorrect. All the features you think are associated with the D in DVCS are perfectly accessible to a more centralized tool.
    - 1718627440 1y ago
      Either you have all data local or you need to send the data around as soon as you traverse or modify history. No not having everything local would be a massive downside for some operations.
      - forrestthewoods 1y ago
        Nonsense. Be specific. Google, Meta, and every large game studio on the planet use large centralized monorepos. It's not only fine, it's great! If you use Git it's not possible to "have everything" because Git is not capable of storing everything that needs to be version controlled. Most devs their version control is actually a combination of Git, docker images, and lord knows how many other data sources. It's a miserable nightmare. Good luck and God speed to anyone who tries to build something from just a few years ago, never mind a 10+ year old project!
        1718627440 1y ago
        I'm not talking about what needs to be in Git and what not, I mean for git functionality that analyzes the history (git blame), the data needs to be traversible, i.e. available locally, fetching it over the wire will introduce massive latency. You claimed it doesn't need to be. > All the features you think are associated with the D in DVCS are perfectly accessible to a more centralized tool.
        1y ago
codethief 1y ago
> A good version control system would support petabyte scale history and terabyte scale clones via sparse virtual filesystem. I like this idea in principle but I always wonder what that would look in practice, outside a FAANG company: How do you ensure the virtual file system works equally well on all platforms, without root access, possibly even inside containers? How do you ensure it's fast? What do you do in case of network errors?
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  NFS server not responding. Still trying... Tom Lyon: NFS Must Die! From NLUUG 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVF_djcccKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVF_djcccKc >Why NFS must die, and how to get Beyond FIle Sharing in the cloud. Slides: https://nluug.nl/bestanden/presentaties/2024-05-21-tom-lyon-why-nfs-must-die-and-how-to-get-beyond-file-sharing-in-the-cloud.pdf https://nluug.nl/bestanden/presentaties/2024-05-21-tom-lyon-... Eminent Sun alumnus says NFS must die: https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/06/17/eminent-sun-alumnus-says-nfs-must-die/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/06/17/eminent-sun-alumnus-sa...
- forrestthewoods 1y ago
  Someone just needs to do. Numerous companies have built their own cross-platform VFS layers. It’s hard but not intractable. Re network errors. How many things break when GitHub is down? Quite a lot! This isn’t particularly special. Prefetch and clone are the same operation.
ants_everywhere 1y ago
Yeah we're at the CVS stage where everyone uses it because everyone uses it. But most people don't need most of its features and many people need features it doesn't have. If you look up git worktrees, you'll find a lot of blog articles referring to worktrees as a "secret weapon" or similar. So git's secret weapon is a mode that lets you work around the ugliness of branches. This suggests that many people would be better suited by an SCM that isn't branch-based. It's nice having the full history offline. But the scaling problems force people to adopt a workflow where they have a large number of small git repos instead of keeping the history of related things together. I think there are better designs out there for the typical open source project.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  Git now has artificial feet to aim the foot guns at so they hit the right target.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  I don't understand what you mean by "the ugliness of branches". In my experience, branches are totally awesome. Worktrees make branches even more awesome because they let me check out multiple branches at once to separate directories. The only way it could get better is if it somehow gains the ability to check out the same branch to multiple different directories at once.
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    > ability to check out the same branch to multiple different directories at once. So you want shared object storage, but separate branch metadata. That's git clone with hardlinks, which is what Git does locally by default.
    - matheusmoreira 1y ago
      Git worktrees won't allow me to check out a branch twice though. I wonder if there's some technical limitation that prevents it.

matheusmoreira 1y ago

Completely disagree. Git is fundamentally functional and good. All projects are local and decentralized, and any "centralization" is in fact just git hosting services, of which there are many options which are not even mutually exclusive.

the_arun 1y ago
Are you missing the central hosting services provide a good backup plan for your locally hosted git?
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  I agree! They are excellent git backup services. I use several of them: github, codeberg, gitlab, sourcehut. I can easily set up remotes to push to all of them at once. I also have copies of my important repositories on all my personal computers, including my phone. This is only possible because git is decentralized. Claiming that git is centralized is complete falsehood.
compiler-guy 1y ago
Got works fine and is solid and well enough known to be a reasonable choice for most people. But I encourage everyone to try out a few alternatives (and adopt their workflows at least for a while). I have no idea if you have or not. But fine has never used the alternatives, one doesn’t really know just how nice things can be. Or, even if you still find fit to be your preferred can, having an alternative experience can open you to other possibilities and ways of working. Just like everyone should try a couple of different programming languages or editors or anything else for size. You may not end up choosing it, but seeing the possibilities and different ways of thinking is a very good thing.
ItsHarper 1y ago
Yeah, the decentralized design is incredibly useful in the day-to-day, for ~any project size.
- forrestthewoods 1y ago
  Incorrect. All the features you think are associated with the D in DVCS are perfectly accessible to a more centralized tool.
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    Either you have all data local or you need to send the data around as soon as you traverse or modify history. No not having everything local would be a massive downside for some operations.
    - forrestthewoods 1y ago
      Nonsense. Be specific. Google, Meta, and every large game studio on the planet use large centralized monorepos. It's not only fine, it's great! If you use Git it's not possible to "have everything" because Git is not capable of storing everything that needs to be version controlled. Most devs their version control is actually a combination of Git, docker images, and lord knows how many other data sources. It's a miserable nightmare. Good luck and God speed to anyone who tries to build something from just a few years ago, never mind a 10+ year old project!
      - 1718627440 1y ago
        I'm not talking about what needs to be in Git and what not, I mean for git functionality that analyzes the history (git blame), the data needs to be traversible, i.e. available locally, fetching it over the wire will introduce massive latency. You claimed it doesn't need to be. > All the features you think are associated with the D in DVCS are perfectly accessible to a more centralized tool.
        1y ago

codethief 1y ago

> A good version control system would support petabyte scale history and terabyte scale clones via sparse virtual filesystem. I like this idea in principle but I always wonder what that would look in practice, outside a FAANG company: How do you ensure the virtual file system works equally well on all platforms, without root access, possibly even inside containers? How do you ensure it's fast? What do you do in case of network errors?

DonHopkins 1y ago
NFS server not responding. Still trying... Tom Lyon: NFS Must Die! From NLUUG 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVF_djcccKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVF_djcccKc >Why NFS must die, and how to get Beyond FIle Sharing in the cloud. Slides: https://nluug.nl/bestanden/presentaties/2024-05-21-tom-lyon-why-nfs-must-die-and-how-to-get-beyond-file-sharing-in-the-cloud.pdf https://nluug.nl/bestanden/presentaties/2024-05-21-tom-lyon-... Eminent Sun alumnus says NFS must die: https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/06/17/eminent-sun-alumnus-says-nfs-must-die/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/06/17/eminent-sun-alumnus-sa...
forrestthewoods 1y ago
Someone just needs to do. Numerous companies have built their own cross-platform VFS layers. It’s hard but not intractable. Re network errors. How many things break when GitHub is down? Quite a lot! This isn’t particularly special. Prefetch and clone are the same operation.

ants_everywhere 1y ago

Yeah we're at the CVS stage where everyone uses it because everyone uses it. But most people don't need most of its features and many people need features it doesn't have. If you look up git worktrees, you'll find a lot of blog articles referring to worktrees as a "secret weapon" or similar. So git's secret weapon is a mode that lets you work around the ugliness of branches. This suggests that many people would be better suited by an SCM that isn't branch-based. It's nice having the full history offline. But the scaling problems force people to adopt a workflow where they have a large number of small git repos instead of keeping the history of related things together. I think there are better designs out there for the typical open source project.

DonHopkins 1y ago
Git now has artificial feet to aim the foot guns at so they hit the right target.
matheusmoreira 1y ago
I don't understand what you mean by "the ugliness of branches". In my experience, branches are totally awesome. Worktrees make branches even more awesome because they let me check out multiple branches at once to separate directories. The only way it could get better is if it somehow gains the ability to check out the same branch to multiple different directories at once.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  > ability to check out the same branch to multiple different directories at once. So you want shared object storage, but separate branch metadata. That's git clone with hardlinks, which is what Git does locally by default.
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago
    Git worktrees won't allow me to check out a branch twice though. I wonder if there's some technical limitation that prevents it.