Or is it a solved problem and Git is the endgame of VCS
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.
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://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
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.
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)
(Pretty sure I've said this before and it's been shot down before, so...)
* 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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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/
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
For standard needs, probably going to be difficult.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.mdThe 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.
What features do you think need to be improved? From a purely UX pov I think git is probably the best software I’ve used. It just works.
Git as practiced by GitHub and gitlab is awful quite a lot of the time.
If it doesn't have multiple clouds providers with pull requests, and at least one of those clouds providers isn't a megacorp, it probably won't be the safe boring choice, unless it's fully P2P.
It needs to be packaged in distros, have GUI integrations, etc.
Fossil looks really cool, I really like how they integrate the wikis and issues. But I don't know anyone who uses it, and the cloud providers seem to be smaller "Could go away any time" companies.
I've never really explored any other VCSes, because none ever seem like they're going to be serious competitors.
I'd be more interested in enhancing Git, but it seems a lot of the most interesting git plugins and extensions aren't updated, like GitTorrent.
A lot of proposal in this thread would have improved one of these at huge detriment of others.
The only way I could see it changing is if we have a complete paradigm shift. This is what happened when we went from SVN to Git (centralised to distributed).
But you could also do better than Linux or OSX as an OS, but the mindshare and industry investment there is so strong, moving to a new thing is a monumental undertaking
There is definately scope for a beginner friendly UI/UX. Julia Evans has a post lately about confusing aspect of git. Ability to version control large files (like git-lfs) would be a nice addition.
I've read so many comments to the effect that "X is a solved problem" when it clearly wasn't that I've come to conclude that the phrase means the opposite of its surface value...
I'm pretty sure that Git is not the end-of-line as far as VCSs go. Whether I will ever change my VCS, again, ever, that is an entirely different question. I've been through so many of them (RCS; a bit of CVS; a bit of Subversion which promised to be CVS-without-the-flaws, which it was not; Mercurial, because hey it was written in Python, so must be good, right? right?; finally Git; and of course the usual `report-v4-revision-good-one.doc` renaming game; plus a plethora of backup solutions, some really bad ones among them)—so many of them I'd be loathe to switch to yet another one, except maybe Fossil, which I almost did.
So yeah, I had totally forgotten about https://fossil-scm.org ; the reason it didn't become my go-to solution is probably mainly the fault of github.com, which I find too good to be ignored, and I don't want an 'impedance mismatch' between my system and their system. But maybe it would be doable and maybe Fossil is good enough to be worth it; at any rate, go read their docs, especially where they compare themselves directly to Git and give lots of good reasons for their way of doing things. This is the same people who are doing SQLite, so I'd say a trustworthy source of reliably top quality software.
Other than that, my personal way of dealing with the complexities of Git is to avoid using parts that I don't need or don't know about well enough (i.e. almost all of it). I use it to check in changes, give one line of comment, and upload to github.com; then of course cloning and updating existing repos as well as setting up a new ones is within my skill set. Branching and merging not so much. So it's like `git` plus `clone`, `add`, `commit`, `push`, that's all; also, I use Sublime Merge for part of these (reviewing changes, adding related changed chunks, commit) which I must recommend for the piece of fine software that it is.
I also at some point toyed with gitless (I think it was called) which promised to be Git, but simpler for the simple things and you can always fall back to Git proper where called for; this I find a good proposition that I like (Markdown: fall back to HTML; CoffeeScript: fall back to JavaScript) but somehow gitless didn't stick with me; I guess that's b/c I've already tempered down my usage of Git to a point near absolute zero, and command line history + Sublime Merge does the rest.
What matters is if git is good enough.
Or more specifically, is if git good enough for X when X is something that is actually being done.
I mean, git is good enough for my very minimal needs and the needs of people with much more sophisticated needs than mine (e.g. the Linux team). And since I know more about git than any other VCS (in part because there are better resources for learning git than any other VCS) learning another VCS for the sake of learning another VCS wouldn't help me get anything done.
None of that means git is good enough for your needs, but statistically, it probably is good enough for your needs because statistically, most difficulties with git are related to training and knowledge since the mathematics underpinning git are (to the best of my understanding) sound.
Which also implies (not accidentally) that being better than git requires better resources for learning the new VCS than git has, and that's a very tall order.
Good luck.