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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

    > Which is the VCS most suitable for ....

Git.

It doesn't matter what your question is. :-)

I mean, come on, it's not like you have a choice. You gotta use whatever your teammates/coworkers/organization is using.

That said, yeah, there's a lot of pedagogic problems with git stemming from the INSANE inconsistency of command-line. The only redeeming quality? It works and it's popular.

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I really hope Git isn't the end of the road for VCS. I work in visual effects and video games. Most video game studios still begrudgingly use Perforce for project data. Many also have a separate Git server for code. Perforce or SVN is still the go to solution for binary assets. Trying to explain Git to programmers is difficult enough, for artists who have never used the command line it is unreasonable. Every time I've seen an "asset library" it's usually written from scratch instead of built on another VCS. I've made some crude attempts at building on Git and the data just structure isn't appropriate.

I know it's a bit unreasonable to expect the same tool for everything (but that's what you were implying). The binary problem is more manageable for code with a few UI assets (like icons), but isn't great.

I work in web development and Git has usually been good enough for our projects. But recently we have had a few projects that used large files and started using git-lfs in those. Is git-lfs not good enough for storing large assets in a git repository?

Speaking of non-coders using a VCS, our designers use Sketch (a macOS app) and until recently have used Dropbox for sharing and put the date into the file name as a form of version control. But they have now started using the Abstract app (https://www.goabstract.com/) which is a fancy UI around git (I think, not sure though), but none of that VCS complexity is leaking through. And they seem to like it. So maybe all it takes is a custom GUI that's tailored for a narrow and specific use case.

On those web projects, is Git used just for versioning the delivered assets (psd, jpg, and gifs) or is it used for the working files (Illustrator, Photoshop, etc)? I've used it for the former, which is why I said it was more manageable, but not a great solution. If you were to treat it like we do code, you'd only commit the working files and have a build script to generate the deliverables.

Those are tooling problems, but I also think there are architectural problems. I don't have a lot of experience, but I have looked at git-lfs. You need a separate repo and also a separate path for data, right? It's also an add-on. It's all working around Git itself. For artists, what's the value add over Perforce or SVN? I can see that maybe you could use the same tools as the coders, but you have a bunch of new problems. I'm not saying it doens't have its place. I can see myself using it in the future, it just doesn't look like an out of the box solution.

A few years ago I was toying with something that would be more like how a lot of backup systems work (and I think macOS attempted something like this a few years ago and abandoned it). Each time you save it will make an auto-commit, if your app has integration, it takes a screen shot and stores any metadata from the scene (this was targeting a 3d application, but with the goal of also working with the filesystem directly). You could also make an explicit commit and give a commit message. Auto-commits would get flattened into hourly, daily, weekly. Explicit commits would stay around as indefinitely as you'd want. Git was a poor backend for this because I don't think you can merge commits in the background, that also rewrites history. This was focusing on version control for an individual, ignoring collaboration and merging.

The whole reason Git was written is because the data-structures facilitate the needs of the Linux kernel's programmers more cleanly (“Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”) I feel like a lot of these Git tools for artists are coercing Git's data structures into an awkward workflow. That's the biggest reason why I hope it's no the end of the road for VCS.

Thanks for introducing me to Abstract. I know I've seen similar attempts in the past. I hope it's useful to artists and I hope Abstract is a successful business, but I'm a bit bummed that Open Source is relegated to a sub-group of programming.

Based on my brief stint in the game development industry, it seems that there are two major obstacles that keep artists from adopting Git. One is the tooling: most of the tools artists use have integrated support for Perforce. This problem is not trivial, but it's something that could ultimately be overcome.

A much bigger obstacle is the workflow. The reason why coders can work with a DVCS is because merging in other people's changes is something that can be clearly defined and executed. When it comes to assets, there is no clear definition of whether and how you can merge changes. It's not even clear for which kinds of assets diff and merge are concepts that make sense.

There's a lot of work that could be done there, but it doesn't seem like it will be done any time soon, mostly because game development is one of the most single-minded fields in software development industry; the only thing that matters is momentum and meeting the deadlines at all costs (witness the latest Rockstar Games controversy about 100-hour weeks) and everything else is secondary.

In practice, most people don't expect binary files to diff or merge. It's more about how mergeable groups of files or commits are. I've seen a few tools that diff certain image formats, which can be helpful, but I don't think this is all that different than what Git does with text.

I agree that the bigger issue is workflow. Often after setting them up I get asked for a checkout/locking model because that's easier to police and gives you a clear straight-line history (anyone who has used it is also aware of the downsides). Git's permissive system where you can make changes, but then you have to resolve them before committing shifts around the problem. This seems to be more of a problem for them? Maybe because they're more medium-sized and have more of a flat hierarchy?

I was going to bring up Unreal Engine. It has had Perforce integration for awhile and Git integration has been in beta (I wouldnt be surprised if that has changed in the last few years). It abstracts everything into the engine UI (so no things like branching). It performed way worse. Their docs have a lot more caveats.

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Unreal_Project_Git_Workflow_(T... https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Git_source_control_(Tutorial)

To be fair, I don't see indie studios bothering with Perforce, either.

> To be fair, I don't see indie studios bothering with Perforce, either.

What then? SVN?

Nothing. If you're lucky they'll have their own obtuse naming structure of "carrot_model_FINAL_FINAL_12.psd" With something like Unreal Engine, Maya, Photoshop, etc. you can get a few knowledgable artists and build a game with minimal technical skill. If it's not as turnkey as using Dropbox or Windows Backup, they probably won't use it.

I started at a place in 2011 that had been open since 1993 and had spun off some software that is industry standard. They were proud they had recently got everyone using SVN. For the entire life of the company teams used whatever they wanted and most used nothing. They're still using SVN.

I don't understand how it is possible to work like this. As soon as I started learning programming I immediately wished for and imagined some kind of version control. I didn't have to imagine much, as I very quickly learned about cvs (the standard back then).

My partner, a scientist, that deals with all kind of data and code and latex has expressed the need for version control too (sadly I have not been able to explain git well enough such that it makes enough sense so she could use it).

I've gone back and forth (and I probably spend more time thinking about tools at the expense of solving problems). I have a lot of git repos with either 1 commit or where I never even bothered committing. If you're programming you can just tar up the source folder and call it a day. 95% of the use case for VCS is committing to a single tree. Depending on what you're doing, it's rare you'll even look backward. If so, timestamps and usernames are often good enough (you wont even look at the code). It takes a lot of upfront work to be able to write a new unit test then run it on the source history to see when the regression was introduced (even though I think that's really cool).

The huge benefit of VCS is project management, which most people brush off as much as possible. Git and SVN provide models where responsibility is clear. For one person, it's a bit ridiculous to stage, commit, push, merge, build, test, release, but necessary when you get a few people involved or what to share the source code.

Artists are a different beast. First off, artists are often delivering art and never have to open the project again. It's like if programmers were hired for a couple hours to a couple weeks and only ever handed over binaries with no expectation to ever support or revisit it. For programming, a directory along with a series of files make up a project. For a lot of artist tools there's a monolithic binary project file. Generating "deliverables" are often done manually or configured inside the monolithic project file, where programmers would write a separate build script. Both with programmings and artists they mix project files, intermediate data, and deliverables all together. Programmers and scientists are the only ones with the motivation and technical skill to tease that apart and push for changes.

    > unreasonable to expect the same tool for everything

Git is not the end of the road for vcs.

While I am sure that there are scenarios where other tools are better-suited, question I was responding to wasn't signaling any of those relatively edge-case scenarios (like binary assets in games).

The sad truth is git has now utterly dominates version control in such a way that you pretty much have to master it to be able to work in a team of developers because, most likely, they are using git.

Whatever the case, few of us get to choose what vcs we get to use. So if it is not git, it is perforce, subversion, or something else or even nothing.

"Just adapt" is what I should have said first.

It works and it's popular and the underlying model is easy to understand.

I think step one to replacing git will be to launch a tool that completely replaces the git CLI but uses the same model below. I've not looked into EasyGit much, but I don't think it goes far enough.

People once said that about Subversion.

I believe Mercurial has a chance if they get support for large binary files right before git does.

Subversion wasn't a distributed VCS. Anything looking to displace git would have to make that kind of generational leap for the existing userbase to be remotely interested.

Being distributed is really more of a 00s concept anyway. It makes total sense that distributed systems would be replaced with more centralized ones as the internet itself goes through a similar transition.

Most git user do not use the distributedness. So maybe Subversion will make a comeback similar to how people now realize that monoliths (instead of Microservices) are often better.

Distributed has disadvantages. For example, Subversion has nicely incrementing revisions like r42, where git has 8ab52fd9ee.

Mercurial is distributed as well.

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