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

173 points by slalomskiing 2 years ago | 298 comments

Do you think it’s possible to make a better version control system than Git?

Or is it a solved problem and Git is the endgame of VCS

Apreche 2 years 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.

dafelst 2 years ago | |

While I feel like this is generally true for most programmers and knowledge workers, Git is absolutely not suited to the workflow of several industries, including the one I work in: games.

Working with an engine like Unreal Engine for a project of any reasonable size requires working with both hundreds of thousands of active files (my current project's repo's HEAD has ~400k) and hundreds of gigabytes of active files, many of which are many GB on their own. Our repository (in perforce) is currently in the order of 10TB.

Git, even with LFS and partial clone and shallow copies and fsnotify just falls apart at this scale. Add to that the necessity for less-technical people (artists, designers, VFX, audio, etc) to use it, and it is really just a non starter.

I absolutely loathe Perforce (having used and occasionally admin'd it professionally since 2007), but I begrudgingly admit that is is currently the only publicly available VCS that can fulfill all of the requirements of this industry in a practical way. Plastic and the others just aren't there yet.

withinboredom 2 years ago | | |

This is a solved problem with git. I’ve worked on bigger projects than yours with histories that are so big you can’t clone them if you wanted to. I’ll make a note to drop what to google for tomorrow, but basically the history is fully available but git knows how to query it over the network. When you open a file, it loads it over the network. Remote build systems do your builds.

Most of this was built by Microsoft to work on Windows with git.

We moved from SVN in the late 2010’s, and holy crap man, did it change our workflows. No longer were we passing around patch files in a team for code reviews, but actually reviewing code somewhat like on GitHub. It was magical.

firesteelrain 2 years ago | | |

That’s why you need a binary repository like Artifactory and not store your large files in Git. But you can still track them in Git with the large files in a binary repository like Artifactory.

karmakaze 2 years ago | | |

This could be solved with references rather than copies if your tools integrated them. e.g. dependencies can be ref'd with source/name and version. To ensure availability all such used blobs could be stored efficiently elsewhere and versioned.

It's great that Perforce works and I've heard others in the graphics field using it, so it satisfies a need. Don't know if/when it would be a general need for say GitHub users.

Brian_K_White 2 years ago | | |

This sounds like a case of using excel as a db. Holding a hammer by it's head a declaring it unfit for normal people to paint with.

cflewis 2 years ago | |

This post is a terrible failure of imagination that would make one stop language development as C because it was so much better than Assembly.

If you have no problems with Git, then I’m happy for you. I certainly have problems with Git, eg its inability to handle large repositories meaningfully (enjoy a Chromium checkout!), the arcane CLI commands, the shut-your-eyes-and-hope of moving commits between branches and other sharp edges.

That Git has been as resilient as it has is largely a function of being written by Torvalds and GitHub network effects. It isn’t for lack of better/as good features found in other VCS methodologies.

dasil003 2 years ago | | |

I think it's definitely possible to create a better CLI than git, however I think the majority of what unhappy users of git are imagining when they ask for a better UI would oversimplify things and end up removing a lot of valuable capabilities. These capabilities may not be suitable for a non-technical audience, but I believe should be table stakes for professional software developers as they are very sharp tools for managing the software development lifecycle that transcend specific languages or domains one may be working in.

To take your example of moving commits between branches, the git rebase parameters and --onto flag are definitely confusing, but each of them is clear and necessary when understood. The CLI could be refactored to be clearer, but the hard part is understanding what each one means, which you would need to do anyway even with a better CLI. Obviously one can work around these knowledge gaps, but once you understand them they are useful for an entire career and the warts tend to fade in importance relative to the value of a tool with the insane power-to-weight and rock solid architectural tradeoffs of git.

sroussey 2 years ago | | |

git still has issues with lots of files. I downloaded the sec Edgar database as files and I thought it would be nice way to store and watch changes.

Nope.

So slow. It does not like millions of files. And all my tooling that does a “quick” git status locked up the terminal, vs code, etc.

mmis1000 2 years ago | | |

There is a major misconception that you move your "commit" around. Actually, each commit in the git history refer to a specific directory state and parent of such commit. You can't meaningfully "move" a commit directly. What the cherrypick and rebase does is.

1. The client diff content of your commit with previous one. 2. Apply such diff on content of another commit. 3. Create a new commit with the old commit message/author of commit in step 1.

And that is also what make git work for everyone, because it is simply a directory that contains tons of new_new_updated_project on steroids. It's up to you to decide what to do with it.

penguin_booze 2 years ago | | |

> its inability to handle large repositories meaningfully

Out of curiousity, what other SCM tools can pull this off better?

Aperocky 2 years ago | | |

> arcane CLI commands

Are the syntax of the commands the issue or are all CLI commands arcane to you? What would you propose to be the command syntax if you were designing it?

tester756 2 years ago | |

>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.

I disagree, really.

There is not fundamental reason why you cannot have user-friendly UI for 98% of the cases and some "advanced" for those 2%.

Just like GUIs have "advanced" settings, the CLI can have well designed 10 commands for basic usage that are taught to newbies and then advanced ones.

lamontcg 2 years ago | | |

The problem is that for 99.99% of the people engaged in the debate over if git is good or not and should be replaced the correct answer for them is "stop fighting it and just learn git" because there's nothing better. They need to stop thinking about how git sucks because that is literally getting in the way of their career goals and is self-sabotage.

And if anyone seriously wants to try to replace git they need to understand how git works first at the level of an advanced expert first anyway. At that point, you can have the discussion about how to make git, with better LFS/monorepo support, with a more pleasant UI/UX, etc.

gitaarik 2 years ago | | |

Isn't this the case with git? If you only do basic stuff I think you don't need more than 10 commands. And if you wanna go more advanced, you have the other commands and flags. Git has also added some new commands like `switch` to make it easier for newbs.

Apreche 2 years ago | | |

Do it then. Many have tried. All have failed. Talk is cheap.

jampekka 2 years ago | |

> 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.

There's a lot of "useless" complexity in the Git UI. The naming of the commands and the underlying concepts are quite inconsistent. The commands themselves are inconsistent. It's rare to see somebody, even git fans, to dispute that the UI is far from optimal. And the warts in the UI are being improved.

These UI warts start to become invisible when you get used to them, but e.g. when teaching git they become painfully obvious again.

The underlying git architecture is simple and it's the simplicity that makes git powerful. Powerful tools don't necessarily need complex interfaces. In fact power often comes from simple interfaces that compose well.

mejutoco 2 years ago | | |

We could get aliases that get slowly incorporated into git. Like, let's say git undo instead of git reflog, or things like that. It would not be too difficult to support a couple of names to do the same thing and let people use the one they prefer.

bryanlarsen 2 years 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.

mikewarot 2 years ago | | |

>it saves snapshots rather than changes

Once you understand this, GIT makes a whole lot more sense. The trouble with failed merges is an artifact of trying to appear like it tracks deltas. Merge conflicts when you're the only programmer on a product (but have multiple computers) are maddening.

I blew away .git and everything in it, restarting a repository, more than once because I couldn't resolve a merge conflict, before I learned that simple fact.

I've got from .zip files of my source code on floppy disks, to SVN, then Mercurial, and finally GIT. GIT is amazing, though the UI is a pain, as most agree.

kevincox 2 years ago | | |

Not only merge conflicts I find that this causes trouble if you need to manage multiple branches. Generally you see patterns like 1. Create patch 2. Merge to main branch 3. Backport a cherry pick.

But there is no machine-readable metadata that the commit is the same in both cases. In simple cases you can work around this by basing the patch off of the merge base but if there are conflicts that doesn't work well.

The result of this is that these two different but logically identically commits will cause future merge conflicts and make questions like "does this branch have this patch" much more difficult to answer.

This is something that I think https://pijul.org/ does quite well. Their base unit is a patch and that can be applied to multiple places. You can also have snapshots which are logically a collection of patches.

rendall 2 years ago | | |

> doesn't capture some metadata changes like renames

If you rename the file using git and that is the only change in your file, then it works:

  git mv oldfile newfile

Commit that change and the rename is in your history.

tehbeard 2 years 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.

gitaarik 2 years ago | | |

Don't the snapshots make it much faster than without?

darose 2 years ago | |

> Git has no such problem. There’s nothing it can’t do.

It can't display me the branch I'm working on, starting from the commit that began the branch, until the last commit. (Or if it can, I have no idea how to do it.)

This isn't a functionality issue, but rather a conceptual one. Git just fundamentally thinks of branches differently than I do. (And, maybe most humans?) To me, a branch begins ... when I branch it. To git, a branch begins ... at the very first commit ever in the repo, since they consider commits that were made before the branch point to still be part of the branch. The branch point then is just another commit to git - and not even one that they think is important enough to highlight. But without any ability to clearly identify the branch point, you can often find yourself looking through a forest of commits that are irrelevant to what you're really searching for.

I spent the better part of an hour the other day trying to figure out how to identify my branch point. (For the record, the best solution I eventually found was: cat .git/refs/heads/<branch name>.) Just my $0.02, of course, but IMO this is absurd - and a big feature gap / user friendliness issue with git compared to other VCS's.

IMO git is just another step in the evolution of VCS's, and not necessarily even one of the better ones. Its concepts, functionality, and feature set are focused primarily on distributed development and multiple people maintaining different source trees ... which is fine for the Linux kernel and other projects that heavily use that use case. But many/most projects don't work that way, and for them a centralized VCS is sufficient. I have no doubt that a better VCS will come along and replace git one day.

kmacleod 2 years ago | | |

  git log <base-branch>..<branch>

I often need the count of commits, usually for build IDs,

  git rev-list --count <branch> ^<base-branch>

I usually use gitk for visualizing branch commits. CLI equivalent is

  git log --graph --oneline --all

flohofwoe 2 years ago | |

Git keeps the entire history on your local machine, this becomes a problem if your project grows to several hundred GB (not untypical in game dev). Even SVN was much better for working with large repositories, you only needed a big server. Git is quite nice for "source code only projects though".

kevincox 2 years ago | | |

This is true, but it is technically an implementation issue. Git supports shallow and narrow clones. The data model works fine with only partial local knowledge. That being said the "check out all files to disk" approach does have fundamental limits for many operations. It is one of the very few operations that are linear with the tree size but it isn't fundamental to the abstract model of Git. To solve this something like a virtual filesystem that fetches new data as required and tracks changed files can make almost all daily operations scale with the size of the patch, not the size of the tree. The data model for this tracked change would be basically equivalent Git's index structure, just applied to the working tree instead of leaving the working tree on a general purpose filesystem.

That being said the unfortunate truth is that many, many, many users of Git rely on the implementation as the API, directly reading and writing to all corners of the `.git` directory. So even if the core command could support something like this (or a wrapper could be provided) it would likely run into a lot of tooling issues.

jzl 2 years ago | | |

Microsoft created the git virtual file system to address this so that they could move Windows to git. It has since been replaced by “Scalar”.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/azure/de... https://github.com/microsoft/scalar

janosdebugs 2 years ago | | |

I have a lot of huge files and use SVN with it. It's dirt cheap to host, next to no memory requirements, and it comes with a web UI to boot because it's built in top of WebDAV. You can literally open a repo in the browser.

The only downside is the per-file versioning, the update needs to be run on the top directory otherwise interesting problems happen.

anonuser123456 2 years ago | | |

git supports shallow clones.

syndicatedjelly 2 years ago | | |

Does Git LFS help with this problem?

nunez 2 years ago | |

Wholeheartedly agree.

Going from SVN to Mercurial was a night and day experience. Going from Mercurial to Git was a marginal improvement initially but a lasting change long-term.

Then there are the "visual" VCSes like Rational and TFS that are designed to _only_ work within an IDE and grokking them involves wading through hundreds of pages of corporate tech docs.

VCSes (or at least the ones I used) were generally awful before Git.

mlsu 2 years ago | |

All software construction involves essential tasks, the fashioning of the complex conceptual structures that compose the abstract software entity, and accidental tasks, the representation of these abstract entities in programming languages and the mapping of these onto machine languages within space and speed constraints.

Git solves the deeply complex problem of distributed version control. Most complaints about git are actually complaints about the essential complexity of the problem, not the accidental complexity of the tool used to solve it.

baazaa 2 years ago | | |

Totally agree that people spend way too much time complaining about git's solutions but there's not nearly enough criticism of the fact it's solving the wrong problem 99% of the time.

I want to share 5k LOC with a colleague. Anyone who thinks that requires a decentralised solution in 2023 is unwell.

I recently wasted a few hours because I forgot to fetch before running some code. Sure the UI could be better (if you're very tired and you're told you're up-to-date you'll stupidly believe it), but fundamentally the 'feature' that caused this problem is something I'll never use. I'm always going to code with a connection to the internet. I shouldn't need to mentally keep track of local vs remote because that distinction simply shouldn't exist.

jltsiren 2 years ago | | |

Most complaints about git are about the design philosophy of the tool. While there are complex edge cases in distributed version control, the vast majority of situations people actually encounter are not that complex. But because git prioritizes the worst case over the typical case, it's much less usable than it could be.

agumonkey 2 years ago | |

That's what i liked about git too. It felt like a powerful, ready to use tool. CVS and SVN were more bureaucratic, slower and limited. Took zero second for me to drop everything else.

The underlying model is alien to many, it requires non black box approach to get out of pits sometimes but to me it's always worth knowing.

The only decision I dislike about git is the soldered staging area idea. There's a reason why most people end up stashing 109 times a day, and I think there's a golden idea in merging the two

em-bee 2 years ago | |

i mostly agree that git can do almost anything (but see the limitations others bring up), however this claim is easy to disprove:

Whatever effort you are putting into seeking or building an alternative, instead put that effort towards becoming a Git expert.

building an alternative naturally is more work than to learn git for one person, but not everyone needs to do that. a few people building an alternative could save the learning effort of many more people.

instead i'd like to point out a different reason why rebuilding git may not solve the problem:

git is good because it is powerful and flexible.

that power and flexibility by necessity makes git more complex and difficult to use.

you can build a simpler system, but then half of todays git users won't be able to use it because it won't have the features they need.

and a system that has all the features of git today and also solves the problems it currently has will be even more complex and less straigt forward to use.

the best approach is probably to have a common backend that has all the power and flexibility needed, and multiple different frontends that are simplified to only expose the features needed for a particular workflow.

grecy 2 years ago | |

> I’m old enough to have used RCS, CVS, SVN, then finally Git

I'm old enough to have used CVS, SVN and then a bit of git.

I remember the big selling point to go from CVS to SNV was "you can put binaries in there!" ... which we never did.

And now I see the selling point to go from SNV to Git is "you can do really complicated stuff like rebase".... which we've never done.

For a team who just does run of the mill distributed version control stuff (commits, diffs, blame, conflict resolution), can you explain why git is such a huge benefit over SVN?

gitaarik 2 years ago | | |

SVN doesn't do very good conflict resolution. It especially becomes more of a problem when you have multiple people working on several branches, that might want to merge some of each other's work. Apart from this, git also came with many more advanced features that improves branch and history management.

Affric 2 years ago | |

Great comment.

Git really needs a good git tutor game.

Like vim tutor or any one of the n*x/shell games.

yodon 2 years 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/

[1] https://graphite.dev/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7565885

rapnie 2 years 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

[1] 4 montsh ago, 261 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36952796

[2] 2 years ago, 228 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30398662

omeid2 2 years 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

leschak 2 years 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 2 years 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-rela...

not_your_vase 2 years 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)

zadokshi 2 years 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 2 years 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

nrclark 2 years 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.

yencabulator 2 years ago | | |

The two are interchangeable; a computer can make one from the other. Storing deltas makes common operations slower, as getting file contents requires replaying all the deltas through history.

quickthrower2 2 years ago | | |

I wonder how many horrendously named and located files exist in repositories because people don’t want to fuck with the history.

dmos62 2 years 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.

friend_and_foe 2 years 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.

flir 2 years 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...)

IshKebab 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years 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.

bhubert 2 years 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/

lttlrck 2 years 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 2 years 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.

itsafarqueue 2 years ago |

Fossil by sqlite think so as does Sapling by Facebook https://sapling-scm.com

mike_d 2 years 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.

dreamcompiler 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years ago | | |

Y'all know you can change the diff viewer git uses, right?

devjab 2 years ago | | |

You can set a lot of that up with the shared config in the .vscode folder, and then enforce it with whatever rule set you chose and however you chose. We do it with auto-save and the prettier engine for Typescript, the C# engine for C#, the standard VSC engine for C++, whatever the Rust plug in for Rust is called for Rust and so on. Technically it’s a little more free to be done differently by different developers because it’s rather easy to not use our “standards” if you so chose, but if you don’t follow our defined syntax for languages it’ll likely not pass through our CI/CD pipeline, or in a few cases (like indents, line-ends) simply get altered to the standard.

I do agree with your point about different IDEs, but I think VSC is actually one of the better tools for helping development teams unify the way they code. Then again, all our developers use VSC, except for that one guy who is stuck in regular VS and often has a ton of swearing because of it. Which is pretty much the legacy experience of regular VS from having used it for 10 years myself. It still amazes me just how slow it becomes with certain plugins, and how bloaty the various templates are. But hey, he’s happy/angry with it sooo.

I guess the story becomes a little different if you work with PHP or Java or similar, where VSC is arguably much worse than its competition, but you’ll likely still have some developers who prefer it because they also work with other languages. Or in Python heavy environments where there are also a lot of great IDEs for the more ML/AI/BI side of things.

namtab00 2 years ago | |

there was such a thing for c#, called semantic-merge by Codice Software, a Spanish company that after being bought by Unity, killed it...

dv35z 2 years 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 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 2 years 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 2 years ago | |

Github? You can edit and commit online. You probably don’t need to ever branch or merge

JonChesterfield 2 years 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.

bhaak 2 years 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.

TheCondor 2 years 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.

SuperNinKenDo 2 years 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.

bitwize 2 years ago |

Perforce.

As for DVCS, the best one I've used is Darcs: 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/

pulse7 2 years 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...

tinco 2 years 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).

jacobegold 2 years ago | |

Phabricator and Gerrit both do a really good job of this. To me Git works fine as a pure "version control" system, but the process of collaborating on a branch before it gets merged into a shared branch seems to be beyond the scope of version control -- something that a higher layer tool is ideal for.

wldlyinaccurate 2 years 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 2 years 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.

VoxPelli 2 years 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

fragmede 2 years 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 2 years ago | |

Like this? https://github.blog/2020-12-21-get-up-to-speed-with-partial-...

fragmede 2 years 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.

dan-robertson 2 years 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.

retpoline__ 2 years 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 - GitHub is really good, but there's a small problem with that

lionkor 2 years 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 2 years ago | |

> and dont bother making something new.

They don't even bother to add directory tracking ;)

stevenjgarner 2 years 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

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.

CrimsonCape 2 years 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.

zxt_tzx 2 years ago |

I think Git itself is probably too entrenched to be displaced by now, but I recently came across Graphite (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 2 years ago | |

This is really interesting. Have you tried it before? How do you like it?

zxt_tzx 2 years 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!

mbfg 2 years 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.

hiAndrewQuinn 2 years 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 2 years 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.

countWSS 2 years 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.

tasubotadas 2 years ago |

Yes. Take a look at Mercurial

aaomidi 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years 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.

mappu 2 years ago | | |

If it's the same underlying repo then it would be nice to avoid needing two git remotes for it (original + fork). But how you do that, i'm not sure.

gavinhoward 2 years 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 2 years ago | |

Semantic diffs would be a very long overdue, and a very welcome, change.

gavinhoward 2 years 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.

v3ss0n 2 years 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.

PhilipRoman 2 years 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 2 years ago | |

what's the difference between physical history and the logical one?

thanks in advance

PhilipRoman 2 years 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.

estiaan 2 years 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

arein3 2 years 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.

jansan 2 years 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 2 years 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.

screye 2 years 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.

alexecldn 2 years 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.

almostnormal 2 years 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.

gschoeni 2 years 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

The commands are mirrored after git so it is easy to learn, but optimized under the hood for larger datasets.

mihaic 2 years 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.

lordnacho 2 years 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.

Leftium 2 years ago |

Theo describes how Graphite was built on top of git (and Github) to improve DX: 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 2 years 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?

m3047 2 years 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.

a-saleh 2 years 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/ from time to time

dietr1ch 2 years 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

foreigner 2 years 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?

gardenhedge 2 years 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.

armchairhacker 2 years 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/arxanas/git-branchless) and smart merge resolvers (https://github.com/Symbolk/IntelliMerge, 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) and merge conflicts in non-textual files by custom merge resolvers like Unity’s (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), 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). 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://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://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.

sngz 2 years ago |

Yes, its called mercurial

aulin 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years 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.