5 ms·

Git is the next Unix

137 points by kmt 18y ago

timf 18y ago
This is the original entry: http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200801#31 http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200801#31 Same person who brought us "Tracking an entire Windows sytem inside Git" last month: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455320 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455320 Note the title could be construed the wrong way, the author means it is the next unix only as an analogy: it's a new, underlying platform where atomic building blocks can be combined and hooked up by higher level programs to do a lot of great things.
- alecco 18y ago
  Any title describing success or rants on GIT, Lisp, Haskell, or Ruby gets automatic up-votes. And maybe it could be stretched to be "the next Linux." Still wrong.
  - krschultz 18y ago
    I read the article before upvoting it, sounds like you didn't since he made a pretty clear analogy between GIT and Unix that wasn't just link bait.
    - sh1mmer 18y ago
      I hope you read any article on Hacker News before upvoting it. More than that I hope you read the comments too, because if you aren't an expert that might be one here who can help debunk snake oil before you upvote. I've been caught a few times reading a story, upvoting it, and then finding a well written comment a moment later about what total tosh it is.
      - access_denied 18y ago
        ... and agreed with the comment?
        pmjordan 18y ago
        Yes, that happens all the time to me, too. Comments here are often much better argued than the linked articles. And I guess it should be no surprise to you that even well-written articles can be complete tosh.
    - bluefish 18y ago
      It seems like any second order discussion of behavior on Hacker News that takes place in the comments is now getting down modded. I'm a bit worried about the trend towards groupthink this encourages. Perhaps the user did not read the article, krschultz, but users up voting your comment without hearing a response from the previous commenter is just as bad as your assumption. The fact that your snarky response has gotten up voted seems suspect. Regardless, discussion about the community itself is healthy, hopefully the HN community realizes that and can sustain it. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the comment should not be down modded at all, just questioning the reason for which you claim you down modded. (I'm curious to see if this comment will be down modded as well)
    - alecco 18y ago
      OK, I clicked on the advogato.org link, and I confirm it is the same entry as the OP of this thread gave. It is a rant on Git, it is very shallow, it compares Git with an operating system family and filesystems. I stand by my comment, in fact it probably was very tame. This is shallow crap linkbait trash without any real substance.
there 18y ago
i'm not sure how any of that makes it the "next unix". a good filesystem replacement/companion maybe, but hardly an operating system.
- phil_collins 18y ago
  I just assumed the author decided to say something so ridiculous that nobody would try to question whether it makes sense or not.
  - timf 18y ago
    It was an analogy, the author was not suggesting git would be an OS.
- bad_user 18y ago
  Unix is much more than an operating system. It's also a time-tested philosophy of building software. See here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html
jrbedard 18y ago
GIT is built to manage a large collection of small files. e.g. the linux kernel repos, files that are a only a few KB on average. It is optimized to operate fast on such a cluster of small blobs, but as soon as it processes bigger files (MB,GB) its performance and advantages degrade a lot. Also, the lack of partial checkout makes it painful to get only a subset of the large files that you are storing. Probably because you wouldn't want to checkout only part of the linux kernel. But those limitations may only be in the Git porcelain, all the plumbing underneath might be a great base for the concept of a distributed file system. GIT is the first step in the right direction, or even could be the platform to support it. http://www.wizbit.org/drupal/ http://www.wizbit.org/drupal/ is a company that tries to achieve something like that.
psranga 18y ago
Git is great and it blew and expanded my mind. But I have some questions for the the experts. Is git really a fantastic achievement, or is the praise for git coming from people who are not experts in source control (+)? Based on my cursory readings, it appears that the concepts Git uses (dag, everything is a node, tree snapshotting etc) existed in Bitkeeper. (+): I ask this because I've repeatedly found that what looks like a big conceptual leap to outsiders is actually a gradual evolution. Examples: I first thought RISC was a big leap, but on reading up the technical papers later, I realized that it was made of lots of innovations by lots of people.
- cduan 18y ago
  I think your hypothesis is correct, but that doesn't make Git any less of an achievement. Certainly it is the product of technologies that existed, but it is the manner in which Git packages those features that is innovative. Indeed, much of the brilliance of Git is how _simple_ it is conceptually compared to other systems--it is the concepts that Git leaves out, not what it uses, that count.
  - pmjordan 18y ago
    Moreover, git is extremely fast compared to almost every other VCS. Performance was the thing that pushed Linus to start the project in the first place, but it's still amazing just how fast it is.
    - sovande 18y ago
      Performance was the thing that pushed Linus to start the project in the first place No, problems with the bitkeeper license was the reason git was started. Linus was very happy with bitkeeper as the VCS for Linux until some kernel contributor tried to reverse engineer parts of bitkeeper which caused the bitkeeper author to threaten to revoke the free license. Git is basically a rewrite of bitkeeper
      - pmjordan 18y ago
omouse 18y ago
So Git is something that should be built into your OS? Yeah, no shit, that's why Squeak has fine-grained version control built-in, and weren't there operating systems that had version-controlled file-systems?
- access_denied 18y ago
  BeOS, Mac OS X
  - sho 18y ago
    How does OSX have a versioned file system? I do hope you're not going to say Time Machine, that's a hack. A very clever hack mind you, but it's not a true versioned system, for that we'll have to wait til ZFS. I hate to say it, but Windows has far better "versioning" than OSX with NTFS's Shadow Copy. Far better filesystem all round actually, which isn't hard. ZFS can't come a moment too soon!
- spc476 18y ago
  VMS did. It had a configurable (not sure if it was system wide, or user definable) number of versions it kept and it was simple to retrieve past versions (as long as it was within the number of generations it kept). And since it was at the OS level, anywhere you could request a file, you could also specify the version. I don't know if the versions applied to directories though (I doubt it, but my exposure to VMS was quite brief).
  - kragen 18y ago
    No, just files. And it handled the versioning by copying the whole file, if I recall correctly, at a heinous space cost. (My quota was 500k IIRC.)
- giardini 18y ago
  Unisys mainframes do (since 1980)! File versions are termed "cycles": by default new files are allocated a single cycle but that can be changed at allocation time or later. They also had a source editor that kept versions within a file cycle. Lines marked as deleted could be optionally viewed and/or recovered.
aita 18y ago
I am wondering can't we use git as database?
- Deestan 18y ago
  It is a database. Not a relational database, though. But the Tree objects (1) make a hierarchical database. (1) http://book.git-scm.com/1_the_git_object_model.html http://book.git-scm.com/1_the_git_object_model.html
  - richcollins 18y ago
    It will be tough to use as a useful database for most applications without cursors. I'm also not certain that its directories are ordered. If they are, I'm even more doubtful that you can specify a custom ordering.
- wingo 18y ago
  It's a transcriptional database :) http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/04/12/git-a-transcriptional-database http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/04/12/git-a-transcriptiona...
est 18y ago
Git is an OS now? Let's make a GIT native FS first, or distributed information over 'the cloud'

137 points by kmt 18y ago

timf 18y ago

This is the original entry: http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200801#31 http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200801#31 Same person who brought us "Tracking an entire Windows sytem inside Git" last month: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455320 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455320 Note the title could be construed the wrong way, the author means it is the next unix only as an analogy: it's a new, underlying platform where atomic building blocks can be combined and hooked up by higher level programs to do a lot of great things.

alecco 18y ago
Any title describing success or rants on GIT, Lisp, Haskell, or Ruby gets automatic up-votes. And maybe it could be stretched to be "the next Linux." Still wrong.
- krschultz 18y ago
  I read the article before upvoting it, sounds like you didn't since he made a pretty clear analogy between GIT and Unix that wasn't just link bait.
  - sh1mmer 18y ago
    I hope you read any article on Hacker News before upvoting it. More than that I hope you read the comments too, because if you aren't an expert that might be one here who can help debunk snake oil before you upvote. I've been caught a few times reading a story, upvoting it, and then finding a well written comment a moment later about what total tosh it is.
    - access_denied 18y ago
      ... and agreed with the comment?
      - pmjordan 18y ago
        Yes, that happens all the time to me, too. Comments here are often much better argued than the linked articles. And I guess it should be no surprise to you that even well-written articles can be complete tosh.
  - bluefish 18y ago
    It seems like any second order discussion of behavior on Hacker News that takes place in the comments is now getting down modded. I'm a bit worried about the trend towards groupthink this encourages. Perhaps the user did not read the article, krschultz, but users up voting your comment without hearing a response from the previous commenter is just as bad as your assumption. The fact that your snarky response has gotten up voted seems suspect. Regardless, discussion about the community itself is healthy, hopefully the HN community realizes that and can sustain it. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the comment should not be down modded at all, just questioning the reason for which you claim you down modded. (I'm curious to see if this comment will be down modded as well)
  - alecco 18y ago
    OK, I clicked on the advogato.org link, and I confirm it is the same entry as the OP of this thread gave. It is a rant on Git, it is very shallow, it compares Git with an operating system family and filesystems. I stand by my comment, in fact it probably was very tame. This is shallow crap linkbait trash without any real substance.

there 18y ago

i'm not sure how any of that makes it the "next unix". a good filesystem replacement/companion maybe, but hardly an operating system.

phil_collins 18y ago
I just assumed the author decided to say something so ridiculous that nobody would try to question whether it makes sense or not.
- timf 18y ago
  It was an analogy, the author was not suggesting git would be an OS.
bad_user 18y ago
Unix is much more than an operating system. It's also a time-tested philosophy of building software. See here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html

jrbedard 18y ago

GIT is built to manage a large collection of small files. e.g. the linux kernel repos, files that are a only a few KB on average. It is optimized to operate fast on such a cluster of small blobs, but as soon as it processes bigger files (MB,GB) its performance and advantages degrade a lot. Also, the lack of partial checkout makes it painful to get only a subset of the large files that you are storing. Probably because you wouldn't want to checkout only part of the linux kernel. But those limitations may only be in the Git porcelain, all the plumbing underneath might be a great base for the concept of a distributed file system. GIT is the first step in the right direction, or even could be the platform to support it. http://www.wizbit.org/drupal/ http://www.wizbit.org/drupal/ is a company that tries to achieve something like that.

psranga 18y ago

Git is great and it blew and expanded my mind. But I have some questions for the the experts. Is git really a fantastic achievement, or is the praise for git coming from people who are not experts in source control (+)? Based on my cursory readings, it appears that the concepts Git uses (dag, everything is a node, tree snapshotting etc) existed in Bitkeeper. (+): I ask this because I've repeatedly found that what looks like a big conceptual leap to outsiders is actually a gradual evolution. Examples: I first thought RISC was a big leap, but on reading up the technical papers later, I realized that it was made of lots of innovations by lots of people.

cduan 18y ago
I think your hypothesis is correct, but that doesn't make Git any less of an achievement. Certainly it is the product of technologies that existed, but it is the manner in which Git packages those features that is innovative. Indeed, much of the brilliance of Git is how _simple_ it is conceptually compared to other systems--it is the concepts that Git leaves out, not what it uses, that count.
- pmjordan 18y ago
  Moreover, git is extremely fast compared to almost every other VCS. Performance was the thing that pushed Linus to start the project in the first place, but it's still amazing just how fast it is.
  - sovande 18y ago
    Performance was the thing that pushed Linus to start the project in the first place No, problems with the bitkeeper license was the reason git was started. Linus was very happy with bitkeeper as the VCS for Linux until some kernel contributor tried to reverse engineer parts of bitkeeper which caused the bitkeeper author to threaten to revoke the free license. Git is basically a rewrite of bitkeeper
    - pmjordan 18y ago

omouse 18y ago

So Git is something that should be built into your OS? Yeah, no shit, that's why Squeak has fine-grained version control built-in, and weren't there operating systems that had version-controlled file-systems?

access_denied 18y ago
BeOS, Mac OS X
- sho 18y ago
  How does OSX have a versioned file system? I do hope you're not going to say Time Machine, that's a hack. A very clever hack mind you, but it's not a true versioned system, for that we'll have to wait til ZFS. I hate to say it, but Windows has far better "versioning" than OSX with NTFS's Shadow Copy. Far better filesystem all round actually, which isn't hard. ZFS can't come a moment too soon!
spc476 18y ago
VMS did. It had a configurable (not sure if it was system wide, or user definable) number of versions it kept and it was simple to retrieve past versions (as long as it was within the number of generations it kept). And since it was at the OS level, anywhere you could request a file, you could also specify the version. I don't know if the versions applied to directories though (I doubt it, but my exposure to VMS was quite brief).
- kragen 18y ago
  No, just files. And it handled the versioning by copying the whole file, if I recall correctly, at a heinous space cost. (My quota was 500k IIRC.)
giardini 18y ago
Unisys mainframes do (since 1980)! File versions are termed "cycles": by default new files are allocated a single cycle but that can be changed at allocation time or later. They also had a source editor that kept versions within a file cycle. Lines marked as deleted could be optionally viewed and/or recovered.

aita 18y ago

I am wondering can't we use git as database?

Deestan 18y ago
It is a database. Not a relational database, though. But the Tree objects (1) make a hierarchical database. (1) http://book.git-scm.com/1_the_git_object_model.html http://book.git-scm.com/1_the_git_object_model.html
- richcollins 18y ago
  It will be tough to use as a useful database for most applications without cursors. I'm also not certain that its directories are ordered. If they are, I'm even more doubtful that you can specify a custom ordering.
wingo 18y ago
It's a transcriptional database :) http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/04/12/git-a-transcriptional-database http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/04/12/git-a-transcriptiona...

est 18y ago

Git is an OS now? Let's make a GIT native FS first, or distributed information over 'the cloud'