4 ms·

Town Car Version Control

43 points by danielhfrank 14y ago

tjbarbour 14y ago
It's good to see FogCreek being practical and adding in Git support, based on how strong they were pushing for Mercurial before (Joel even had an online training[0]) I wouldn't have guessed they would ever switch to Git, but as Joel said "Religious war: averted." I wish more software would mitigate these debates with solutions like this, but its often not that easy. This seems like a cool solution, I don't know if any of the other big providers are doing synchronized repos, do other similar solutions exist? [0]http://hginit.com/ http://hginit.com/
- famousactress 14y ago
  Devil's advocating, but I worry about solutions like this. Abstractions leak, and if abstractions like this get traction they splinter tools' abilities to do useful things. I imagine there are corner cases where git/hg dissonance is high and wonder if this leads to a situation where we all have to care about whether a backend is capable of 'full git' or 'hg-compatible git'. There are places where this is valuable enough to be worthwhile (say.. ANSI SQL and related high-level-language database agnostic libraries). I'm not convinced source control is one of those places. For fogcreek, they bet the farm on hg and are presumably seeing an opportunity cost to that decision that this mitigates. This makes loads of sense for them. I'm not convinced it's all that awesome for the rest of us, or for either the hg or git user bases as a whole.
  - bradleyland 14y ago
    Interestingly, Joel (founder of FogCreek, producer of Kiln) wrote extensively about leaky abstractions: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...
- j_s 14y ago
  http://www.plasticscm.com/features/lockin2.aspx http://www.plasticscm.com/features/lockin2.aspx > Plastic SCM [...] developed an importer that supports the fast-import > format introduced by Git and widely used to migrate from other systems Most source control systems assume a one-time import because they are so awesome there's no doubt you'll want to keep your code there forever, but the trend is to support at least Git semi-synchronously. http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2013/01/using-plastic-scm-to-sync-with-junior.html http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2013/01/using-plastic-scm... http://www.perforce.com/git-fusion http://www.perforce.com/git-fusion http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/08/13/announcing-git-integration-with-tfs.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/08/13/announcing...
  - gecko 14y ago
    Kiln Harmony is a little bit different than that. We are aiming that you can push a Git repo to Kiln, clone out an Hg repo, push that back to Kiln in an empty repo, and get back exactly the same Git repo you started with. This means that both format types are completely equal--and, more importantly, they're both canonical. Plastic and Perforce are solving a very important, but fundamentally different, problem: how can I use Git to interface with my proprietary SCM? These problems tend to evolve solutions like git-svn or hgsubversion, where either you're keeping the initial repository around as a base (I believe Plastic does this), or you simply don't even care about it at all (e.g., in Perforce, its repos are assembled from arbitrary slices of the main source tree, so the same commit may have different files entirely from the one your neighbor is using, even though both repos include the same chunks of history). Those are also valuable tools, and we did consider making what would amount to a Git front-end for Mercurial. But we really wanted both systems to be peers, both canonical, and that mandated a totally different set of design decisions and restrictions. It's not that what Plastic and Perforce have aren't cool. They're just fundamentally different.
    - j_s 14y ago
      Thanks for clarifying what I meant when I said 'at least Git semi-synchronously'. edit: Is it safe to summarize what you're saying as 'the best hg-git is kiln' ?
- tanzam75 14y ago
  It's because Git has won, in terms of usershare. Bitbucket, the Mercurial hosting service, now also offers Git. Xen, the first major project to use Mercurial, just switched to Git last month. Microsoft has added Git to Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. Whatever Joel's personal source-control preferences were, he has to sell into a world where there are more Git users than Mercurial users. It's unfortunate, as I preferred Mercurial, but then, Git also comes with some advantages to mitigate the disadvantages. They really were closely-matched. Which is why it was a religious war -- it boiled down to preferences.
j_s 14y ago
This Kiln ad/blog post conveniently dances around how GitHub also does the same 'corporate things'. All version control systems have to support Git these days or they are headed for irrelevance.
- atirip 14y ago
  Hmm, if i did say that all browsers have to run on Webkit these days or...
  - j_s 14y ago
    Getting sidetracked here, but for a real-life example: mobile Firefox pretending to be Webkit enough to fool certain sites. http://alistapart.com/article/the-vendor-prefix-predicament-alas-eric-meyer-interviews-tantek-celik http://alistapart.com/article/the-vendor-prefix-predicament-...
corresation 14y ago
It has to somewhat hurt that Microsoft just released and is rapidly improving some quite decent Git support in Visual Studio (and on the server side, Team Foundation Server).
- j_s 14y ago
  Pardon my ignorance, but Microsoft supporting Git server-side is only if they host it for you at http://tfs.visualstudio.com/ http://tfs.visualstudio.com/, correct? http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GitSupportForVisualStudioGitTFSAndVSPutIntoContext.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GitSupportForVisualStudioGitTF... > choose either Git or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) as the source provider [edit: technically also at CodePlex]
  - corresation 14y ago
    Indeed, right now Team Foundation Service (the hosted version) has Git support, however they have promised upcoming support for Team Foundation Server the self-hosted install.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
rrrene 14y ago
He says Kiln has some advantages over github in the corporate space, while github has features for socialized open source coding: So, specifically, Kiln gives you corporate things like: * code reviews * access control and permissions * fast code search * a news feed to follow code you care about GitHub gives you things that match the sociology of open source projects: * public home pages * a social network, with profiles * fork and pull workflow But doesn't github actually provide at least two of the four points he mentions for Kiln?
- herge 14y ago
  As somebody who uses hosted kiln, finding and reading code on github is so much faster it's not even funny. Every time I go to kiln to look at the blame for a page, I despise it. The code review tool on kiln is also sub-par compared to the pull-request review tool in github (and boy is it ugly).
ahoyhere 14y ago
I can't say I would ever trust my code to a tool written by somebody who thinks that this is a good idea: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-shark.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-ju... Also, calling Github a "VW Microbus" and implying they're hippie kumbaya love-ins instead of a huge, well-supported tool with the features he implies they lack… well. It stretches credibility.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Wow, what a terrible comment. I'm surprised to have heard it from you. Witch hunts against companies that use language development as a tool; what a weird thing to see voted to the top of an HN thread.
  - ahoyhere 14y ago
    Saying "I wouldn't trust my xyz to a person who does abc" is not a witchhunt, it's a statement of opinion based on another person's very public and controversial choices. Am I not allowed to find cross-compiling to PHP, ASP and vbscript technically questionable? Or be wary that their founder claims that one of their apps has "literally millions" of calculations on a single page? That just seems like exercising discretion. Just like everyone does when some free service turns draconian and some HNers complain and other HNers say "Well look what they did to their last startup / look what these other free services always end up as, you should have seen the pattern matching on the wall." I believe you've left a few comments to that effect, yourself. Where do you see a difference? Note that I didn't call their app some kind of ridiculous and insulting car metaphor or deliberately leave off features in order to smear them… if we're going to talk about witchhunts.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      You're allowed to call a cross-compiling language questionable, and I'm allowed to call you out for suggesting that the application of basic computer science is a sign of incompetence.
- statictype 14y ago

43 points by danielhfrank 14y ago

It's good to see FogCreek being practical and adding in Git support, based on how strong they were pushing for Mercurial before (Joel even had an online training[0]) I wouldn't have guessed they would ever switch to Git, but as Joel said "Religious war: averted." I wish more software would mitigate these debates with solutions like this, but its often not that easy. This seems like a cool solution, I don't know if any of the other big providers are doing synchronized repos, do other similar solutions exist? [0]http://hginit.com/ http://hginit.com/

famousactress 14y ago
Devil's advocating, but I worry about solutions like this. Abstractions leak, and if abstractions like this get traction they splinter tools' abilities to do useful things. I imagine there are corner cases where git/hg dissonance is high and wonder if this leads to a situation where we all have to care about whether a backend is capable of 'full git' or 'hg-compatible git'. There are places where this is valuable enough to be worthwhile (say.. ANSI SQL and related high-level-language database agnostic libraries). I'm not convinced source control is one of those places. For fogcreek, they bet the farm on hg and are presumably seeing an opportunity cost to that decision that this mitigates. This makes loads of sense for them. I'm not convinced it's all that awesome for the rest of us, or for either the hg or git user bases as a whole.
- bradleyland 14y ago
  Interestingly, Joel (founder of FogCreek, producer of Kiln) wrote extensively about leaky abstractions: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...
j_s 14y ago
http://www.plasticscm.com/features/lockin2.aspx http://www.plasticscm.com/features/lockin2.aspx > Plastic SCM [...] developed an importer that supports the fast-import > format introduced by Git and widely used to migrate from other systems Most source control systems assume a one-time import because they are so awesome there's no doubt you'll want to keep your code there forever, but the trend is to support at least Git semi-synchronously. http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2013/01/using-plastic-scm-to-sync-with-junior.html http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2013/01/using-plastic-scm... http://www.perforce.com/git-fusion http://www.perforce.com/git-fusion http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/08/13/announcing-git-integration-with-tfs.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/08/13/announcing...
- gecko 14y ago
  Kiln Harmony is a little bit different than that. We are aiming that you can push a Git repo to Kiln, clone out an Hg repo, push that back to Kiln in an empty repo, and get back exactly the same Git repo you started with. This means that both format types are completely equal--and, more importantly, they're both canonical. Plastic and Perforce are solving a very important, but fundamentally different, problem: how can I use Git to interface with my proprietary SCM? These problems tend to evolve solutions like git-svn or hgsubversion, where either you're keeping the initial repository around as a base (I believe Plastic does this), or you simply don't even care about it at all (e.g., in Perforce, its repos are assembled from arbitrary slices of the main source tree, so the same commit may have different files entirely from the one your neighbor is using, even though both repos include the same chunks of history). Those are also valuable tools, and we did consider making what would amount to a Git front-end for Mercurial. But we really wanted both systems to be peers, both canonical, and that mandated a totally different set of design decisions and restrictions. It's not that what Plastic and Perforce have aren't cool. They're just fundamentally different.
  - j_s 14y ago
    Thanks for clarifying what I meant when I said 'at least Git semi-synchronously'. edit: Is it safe to summarize what you're saying as 'the best hg-git is kiln' ?
tanzam75 14y ago
It's because Git has won, in terms of usershare. Bitbucket, the Mercurial hosting service, now also offers Git. Xen, the first major project to use Mercurial, just switched to Git last month. Microsoft has added Git to Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. Whatever Joel's personal source-control preferences were, he has to sell into a world where there are more Git users than Mercurial users. It's unfortunate, as I preferred Mercurial, but then, Git also comes with some advantages to mitigate the disadvantages. They really were closely-matched. Which is why it was a religious war -- it boiled down to preferences.

j_s 14y ago

This Kiln ad/blog post conveniently dances around how GitHub also does the same 'corporate things'. All version control systems have to support Git these days or they are headed for irrelevance.

atirip 14y ago
Hmm, if i did say that all browsers have to run on Webkit these days or...
- j_s 14y ago
  Getting sidetracked here, but for a real-life example: mobile Firefox pretending to be Webkit enough to fool certain sites. http://alistapart.com/article/the-vendor-prefix-predicament-alas-eric-meyer-interviews-tantek-celik http://alistapart.com/article/the-vendor-prefix-predicament-...

corresation 14y ago

It has to somewhat hurt that Microsoft just released and is rapidly improving some quite decent Git support in Visual Studio (and on the server side, Team Foundation Server).

j_s 14y ago
Pardon my ignorance, but Microsoft supporting Git server-side is only if they host it for you at http://tfs.visualstudio.com/ http://tfs.visualstudio.com/, correct? http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GitSupportForVisualStudioGitTFSAndVSPutIntoContext.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GitSupportForVisualStudioGitTF... > choose either Git or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) as the source provider [edit: technically also at CodePlex]
- corresation 14y ago
  Indeed, right now Team Foundation Service (the hosted version) has Git support, however they have promised upcoming support for Team Foundation Server the self-hosted install.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

rrrene 14y ago

He says Kiln has some advantages over github in the corporate space, while github has features for socialized open source coding: So, specifically, Kiln gives you corporate things like: * code reviews * access control and permissions * fast code search * a news feed to follow code you care about GitHub gives you things that match the sociology of open source projects: * public home pages * a social network, with profiles * fork and pull workflow But doesn't github actually provide at least two of the four points he mentions for Kiln?

herge 14y ago
As somebody who uses hosted kiln, finding and reading code on github is so much faster it's not even funny. Every time I go to kiln to look at the blame for a page, I despise it. The code review tool on kiln is also sub-par compared to the pull-request review tool in github (and boy is it ugly).

ahoyhere 14y ago

I can't say I would ever trust my code to a tool written by somebody who thinks that this is a good idea: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-shark.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-ju... Also, calling Github a "VW Microbus" and implying they're hippie kumbaya love-ins instead of a huge, well-supported tool with the features he implies they lack… well. It stretches credibility.

tptacek 14y ago
Wow, what a terrible comment. I'm surprised to have heard it from you. Witch hunts against companies that use language development as a tool; what a weird thing to see voted to the top of an HN thread.
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  Saying "I wouldn't trust my xyz to a person who does abc" is not a witchhunt, it's a statement of opinion based on another person's very public and controversial choices. Am I not allowed to find cross-compiling to PHP, ASP and vbscript technically questionable? Or be wary that their founder claims that one of their apps has "literally millions" of calculations on a single page? That just seems like exercising discretion. Just like everyone does when some free service turns draconian and some HNers complain and other HNers say "Well look what they did to their last startup / look what these other free services always end up as, you should have seen the pattern matching on the wall." I believe you've left a few comments to that effect, yourself. Where do you see a difference? Note that I didn't call their app some kind of ridiculous and insulting car metaphor or deliberately leave off features in order to smear them… if we're going to talk about witchhunts.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    You're allowed to call a cross-compiling language questionable, and I'm allowed to call you out for suggesting that the application of basic computer science is a sign of incompetence.
statictype 14y ago