this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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Git
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Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
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Now here is a sentence that would make me immediately stop reading the article. Thankfully it is at the end, since it was a great and interesting read.
But now I wonder, the article does mention that Git has some core design problems. Are there any new emerging VCSs that iterate on the idea and are better (or faster, or have an unique idea about how to handle stuff), or is version control basically a solved problem with Git?
And it's definitely not a solved problem. Aside from the obvious UX disaster, Git has some big issues:
I think the biggest issue is dealing with very large code bases, like the code for a mid-large size company. You either go with a monorepo and deal with slowness, Windows-only optimisations and bare minimum partial checkout support.
Or you go with submodules and then you have even bigger problems. Honestly I'm not sure there's really an answer for this with Git currently.
It's not hard to imagine how this might work better. For instance if Git repos were relocatable, so trees were relative to some directory, then submodules could be added to a repo natively just by adding the commits and specifying the relative location. (Git subtree almost does this but again it's a tacked on third party solution which doesn't integrate well, like LFS.)
The partial checkout support in Git is getting improved. Take a look, maybe it now solves your problems.
Support for large repositories via
scalar
works also for Linux (though not everything is ported; as main body of work on supporting large repositories was created to deal with the size of MS Windows repository, it started with Windows-only support / optimization first).There are alternatives to submodules, like https://github.com/chronoxor/gil
Gil looks quite interesting, thanks for the link!