

Git is the next Unix - oxyona
http://www.advogato.org/person/apenwarr/diary/371.html

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bayareaguy
Git is good at what it was designed to do (manage and distribute changes to
source code) but that's not what most people need. Non-programmers are a lot
better off with simpler things like OSX Time Machine and iDisk.

That said there seems to be a lot of effort duplicated at the file-system
level and at the version-control level. I hope file systems of the future will
expose nicer api's (e.g. change logging) to help version-control systems
become simpler and more efficient.

~~~
jsnx
One could also develop a separate kernel API for version control. Filesystems
without version control would just have null operations in this API, while
filesystems with version control would root around in their database for the
change information.

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bootload
_"... Numerous people have written diff and merge systems for wikis; TWiki
even uses RCS. If they used git instead, the repository would be tiny, and you
could make a personal copy of the entire wiki to take on the plane with you,
then sync your changes back when you're done. ..."_

Now that is a compelling idea. How portable is git? ~
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)

~~~
jey
My friend looked into porting git to Win32 natively and abandoned the effort
because Git uses a ton of UNIX-isms, from fork() to sh scripts.

~~~
etal
I read that git was written to intentionally use every trick available in
Linux for performance. Mercurial has similar features, but it's much more
agreeable to cross-platform work. Mozilla uses it.

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ecuzzillo
It's also the next Unix in that it's kind of hard to use for newbies, and
shits all over your data when you do something that seems like a routine
action (git revert anyone?), but in fact will tell it to self-destruct. svn is
emphatically not this way, which, when you aren't doing anything distributedly
and don't have very many branches, is happy.

~~~
anon
Agreed. SVN is much more user friendly than GIT (command line interface).

The major reason I haven't made the switch from CVS/SVN yet (and am unlikely
to).

~~~
mooneater
I'm struggling with this though I can tell it will be well worth it.

Try the peepcode git tutorial, which includes info on migrating from svn.

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vikram
This guy is mistaken. It's not good enough to track large files. So I think
it's very unlikely that it's what one needs to deal with all of our data
needs. It works for small files and big trees of source, but personal data is
not like that. The trees are shallow and the files huge. How many people here
like to keep their home directory in source control system.

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davidw
"git is so powerful, that when you put light in it, it can't escape"

~~~
apgwoz
If git has five files and you have five files then git has more files than
you.

Git can kill two stones with one bird.

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ralph
bzr is a far nicer RCS. <http://bazaar-vcs.org/> And the next Unix, Plan 9
from Outer Space, but really from Bell Labs, had already implemented the ideas
in its Venti filesystem. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti>

~~~
Tuna-Fish
bzr is fine, as long as you don't want to refactor anything. Ever.

(it doesn't track moving lines between files)

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ph0rque
If this is true, then webapps should use git instead of databases.

~~~
robmnl
For sure in some cases - yet I don't see any metadata and query capabilities.
Are there?

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irrelative
Call me skeptical, but the author seems to do a pretty good job describing the
features with existing features in Unix.

