From where I sit, Git has a couple obvious flaws, and I expect its successor will be the one that fixes one of them. The most obvious (and probably easiest) is the monorepo/polyrepo dichotomy.
Personally I don't see git's problems with large binary files and tens of millions of commits as being major issues. Those two alone are way less valuable than git's ecosystem and mindshare.
Otherwise it won't just be new languages which suffer, but users of supported languages will suffer when there's an upgrade.
Arbitrary diff/merge in Git is a great example of the Turing Tar-Pit. It's possible, but prohibitively inefficient for many things I want to do. You can't add your own types, index, or query optimizations.
Today, if I want to store data for my application, I have a choice between good support for rich object types and connections (e.g., Postgres), or good support for history and merging (e.g., Git). There's no one system that provides both.
I could see myself agreeing to that.
The slowness of destroying a whole database and then recreate it when checking out should be something you can handle by relying on the diff to generate a series of delete commands and a series of insert commands.
But yeah, I guess committing will be slow if you have a lot of data to export. For the time being, it's a trade off to be made.
[I might consider testing this with my current database project. But I'm using SQLite so I guess that implies a lot less data than Postgres.]
A modern but still centralized VCS like Subversion or Perforce is what you get if you first add networking (CVS) and then atomic commits. Without atomic commits you are pretty much forced to keep a centralized server, and Subversion didn't try to change the server model after adding atomic commits.
DVCS instead is what you get if you start with local revision tracking like RCS, and add atomic commits before networking. Now the network protocol can work at the commit level and is much more amenable to distributed development.
Check out git-diff(1) and --diff-algorithm. --anchored is the one I find the neatest.
I like the way you put this. In case anyone's interested in brainstorming I'm dabbling in this problem with a thing called TreeBase (https://jtree.treenotation.org/treeBase/). It's still a toy at this point, but it stores richly typed data as plain text files to leverage git for history and merging and then can use SQLite (or others) for querying and analysis. A very simple database in the wild looks like this: https://github.com/treenotation/jtree/tree/master/treeBase/p...
Imagine instead of that were available as a sort of materialized view.
I don’t understand what you mean by this, can you provide some more detail?
Saying just parse it every time is denying that there are very real costs associated with hat decision.
Envy does versioning of classes and methods, and you can programmatically access to the model.
It allowed us to build tools around the VCS. For example, we had tools to merge multiple feature branches and resolve conflicts automatically. We also used the same tools to produce migration scripts for our database (GemStone). That was 18yrs ago! and today sounds irreal.
You can build tools on top of git, but the versioning “unit” gets in the way. (e.g imagine the possibility to encode refactorings in your change history and reapply or rollback them).
I’m not trying to criticize git. I think it is the best file based DVCS. My point is that many dev tools that we use today are extremely rudimentary, because the lack of good abstractions. And I don’t think that git provides a good model to build those abstractions on top of it.
If that was then extended into the version control system that'd be even better. Oh yes.
But getting a new language into these things would probably be a nightmare.
Most language ASTs also don't encode useful-to-the-programmer but useless-to-the-compiler information like comments and whitespace. There's been good progress in that (the Roslyn AST system has some neat features), but in practice an AST is always intended more for the compiler than the user/source writer. This also is reflected often in speed, a lot of languages have a relatively slow AST generation (which would add sometimes very noticeable wall clock time to commit time, depending of course on language and hardware).
Plus, of course, all the usual bits that ASTs are extremely varied among themselves (some are weirder DAG shapes than trees, for instance).
An experiment I ran was to the use the "next step down" from full AST which is your basic tokenizer / syntax highlighter. Those designed to deal well with malformed/unfinished/work-in-progress input, and to do it very quickly. Years back I built a simple example diff tool that can do token-based diffs for any language Python's commonly used syntax highlighter Pygments supports. [1] In my experiments it created some really nice character-based diffs that seemed "smart" like you might want from an AST-like approach but just by doing the dumb thing of aligning diff changes to syntax highlighting token boundaries.
You could even use it/something like it/something based on it today as your diff tool in git if you wanted, with the hardest part configuring it for which language to use for what file. (I never did do that though, partly because the DVCS I experimented with this for didn't have a pluggable diff system like git does, nor did it support character based unidiff as a storage format which the experiment was partly to prove both ideas could be useful.)
The monorepo/polyrepo discussion exists apart from your choice of version control system and has little to do with Git, as far as I can tell
Merge conflicts.
If the conflict is huge, rebasing can help you by "playing" the commits from one branch one at a time so the conflicts are smaller / easier to fix.
At a previous job, a team was forced to use checkout-style VCS due to their manager's unfounded fear of merge conflicts; I couldn't go in that office without hearing one developer shout to another: "Hey, can you finish up and check in that file so I can get started on my changes?"
This consideration is actually irrelevant to locking non-mergeable binary files. It doesn't matter what branch we're on or where the file is located, only that you and I both want to edit the logo. Eventually, either your version must be based on mine, or mine based on yours, since they will be merged.
So it's probably better not to have that file in Git, since it doesn't support the workflow around which Git is based.
It's actually right to store your design documents in Google Docs or a wiki and your code in Git, rather than everything in Git.
It is easy to have one filestore to rule them all and in the darkness bind them, but if you want to do different things with them, you have to do different things with them. I'm not sure that it's possible to unify text file and binary doc based workflows, but it seems we don't have to worry because users automatically use the best tool for the job and it's only hackers who tie themselves in knots trying to make git do everything.
I'd rather not lock files.
I don't think I need to sell the value of DVCS over VCS, but what seems to get lost is that buys you a certain amount of essential complexity, expressed in the CAP theorem and its consequences.
We discussed this deeply on the Fossil forum: https://www.fossil-scm.org/forum/forumpost/2afc32b1ab
We came to no easy answers, because there aren't any. You only get a choice of which problems to accept.
The alternate method is that locking a file marks you as an interested party to a merge, allowing you to review the correctness of a merge.
This would be purely to avoid changes being lost during merges.
Large files and long histories hinder its total dominance in the game and art industries. Because of git's shortcomings polyrepo is a near necessity not simply a stylistic choice. LFS is a bolt on solution that could/should have better support.
I'm intrigued by this claim. I've come to the opposite conclusion - that monorepo is near necessity with git because there's no tools for branching/rebasing multiple repos at once.
I would use it for storing and syncing libraries of large images for my photography, if it were feasible.
Which one you should use depends on which downsides are less impactful for your use case.
As an optimization, when it packs several objects together in a pack file, it can store objects as a delta to other (possibly unrelated) objects; there's a whole set of heuristics used to choose which objects to delta against, like having the same file name. And yes, one of these heuristics does have an effect similar to "reverse chronological order"; see https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/technic... for the details.
Like gitlabs own web ide that seems to ignore LFS rules.
It would also be nice to have a repo that isn't language-agnostic. It's too easy to track non-semantic changes, like white space.
In my opinion this is a problem with programming languages rather than version control. Namely we mix presentation and representation when using text as our source code. In the case of whitespace we have an infinite number of syntactic presentations which all correspond to the same semantic representation. Tooling has been created to try to deal with this such as code formatters which canonicalize the syntactic presentation for other tools. Git itself even has to deal with this because of platform differences, i.e. LF and CRLF.
I loathe this about git. It has caused my team members so many problems, like images marked as changed.
git should either be dumb about content or smart, not secretly in between.
You are in the minority. It's such a ubiquitous experience, a running joke in the industry. Saying a tool is useful and powerful, is fine and good. That sentiment has nothing to do with usability.
After I had to unfuck a repository for the n-th time, I trialed a switch to Mercurial, we switched shortly after. I can count on one hand how many times I've had to intervene in the last few years.
And they do occasionally put some new stuff in that helps. Like the recent version which adds new commands to split out the two completely different uses for `git checkout` (making/switching branches and reverting files).
i would love to be able to use a patch-based VC.
unfortunately there are no patch-theory based VCS’s with a practical level of usability. what git was to monotone, X is to darcs/pijul, where X hasn’t been created yet.
"Need a centralized server" wasn't specific to one (pre-DVCS) system, either.
Subversion did this better even before Git existed.
Git is completely oblivious to moving code from one file to another. Git blame will never show you the original commit if you just relocated a method to another file. Due to this, refactoring often put additional hurdles into exploring the code history.
The successor might very well be git 3.0, though.
Isn't that being addressed in Git with the partial clone functionality?
Also: > The responsibility of not mixing super and sub-project code in commits lies with you.
Is a lie. The responsibility of not mixing code lies with every member of the team. Does the author work alone?
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-o...
We have 600 devs and face these problems. I can assure you we sure as hell dont have the resources spare to reroll git. We're way too busy rerolling everything else.