Hacker News Reader

Comment by skydhash | Hacker News Reader

> It'll fire on merge issues that aren't code problems under a smarter merge, while also missing all the things that merge OK but introduce deeper issues.

That has not been my experience at all. The changes you introduced is your responsibility. If you synchronizes your working tree to the source of truth, you need to evaluate your patch again whether it introduces conflict or not. In this case a conflict is a nice signal to know where someone has interacted with files you've touched and possibly change their semantics. The pros are substantial, and it's quite easy to resolve conflicts that's only due to syntastic changes (whitespace, formatting, equivalent statement,...)

View on HN

If you're relying on a serialized 'source of truth', against which everyone must independently ensure their changes sanely apply in isolation, the. you've already resigned yourself to a single-threaded process that's slower than what improved merges aim to enable.

Sure, that works – like having one (rare, expensive) savant engineer apply & review everything in a linear canonical order. But that's not as competitive & scalable as flows more tolerant of many independent coders/agents.

And yet after all these year of git supporting no source of truth we still fall back on it. As long as you have an authoritative version and authoritative release then you have one source of truth. Linus imagined everyone contributing with no central authority and yet we look to GitHub and Gitlab to centralize our code. Git is already decentralized and generally we find it impractical.

Decentralization in this case means one can secede easily from the central authority. So anyone working on a project can easily split away from the main group at any time. But every project have a clear governance where the main direction is set and the canonical version of the thing being under version control is stored.

That canonical version is altered following a process and almost every project agrees that changes should be proposed against it. Even with independent agents, there should be a way to ensure consensus and decides the final version. And that problem is a very hard one.

He's not saying you shouldn't have conflicts; just that it's better to have syntax-aware conflict detection. For example if two people add a new function to the end of the same file, Git will always say that's a conflict. A syntax-aware system could say that they don't conflict.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com