This is more a response to many of the comments here than to the article, offering a perspective of what value they might bring.

I’ve spent about 35+ years in and around version control / SCM, with half of that being part of the BitKeeper team, where my job was to think about sets, graphs, and weaves in the context of a team making commercial customers’ lives better along with benefit to open source world.

If Git is good enough for you, know that it is not true for everybody. For some subset of that everybody, it’s worth paying to have that pain go away. And part of having that pain go away is being able to stay connected to all that is, to be enough of a superset of the current world, to not be better in an incompatible way. That’s what I see in the pictures Steve and team draw: world that interacts with Git in a way that is better for some willing to pay to have the pain go away.

I agree nothing much is being said about the Non-Git Storage Engine. As I’ve spent half of my life in that world, I get it: secret sauce. I don’t expect much to be said for a while.

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steveklabnik 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks Rick!

I realize this post is light on technical details. I expected this kind of reaction from HN, which is also fine. The goal here is more to share anything about what it is that we've been doing; a lot of people assumed that we were going to be coming out with a GitHub-style social coding forge for open source, and so on some level, this is us saying we're not going to be doing that. A lot of people also assumed we'd be focusing purely on jj, and so we wanted to make sure to talk about how we do care about git compatibility, even as we look to the future.

We'll be talking more about things as time goes on, but rather than never posting anything, this is the start of us stretching our muscles and being more involved in the public conversation around the future of version control. We've been too quiet!

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nrr 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh, hey. Nice seeing you here. I appreciate your work blazing some interesting trails with graphs and weaves in distributed version control. (Though, I must admit that I'm still left sort of scratching my head at the concept in a bytestream-oriented world instead of in the record-oriented world where I have, say, a deck of JCL cards and for which record-level inclusions and exclusions make sense.)

My criticism of TFA is grounded less in refusing to tell us about the secret sauce than it is, uh, not giving us anything at all technologically substantive to chew on, I guess. I can certainly use my imagination given my own experience in these particular salt mines, and I know that Steve and team are good for the technology, but I'm nonetheless wondering who is intended to be TFA's audience.

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rbsmith 2 days ago | parent [-]

> I'm still left sort of scratching my head at the concept in a bytestream-oriented world instead of in the record-oriented world where I have, say, a deck of JCL cards and for which record-level inclusions and exclusions make sense

Long live CDC Update!

> who is intended to be TFA's audience

I got something from seeing that last diagram. True, I don't know what features that future work will bring, but see that what ever it is, they want to keep it mappable to Git. Staying mappable to Git is a tether that can limit or reward creativity.

You posted before Steve's response[0]. Does that help?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49664978

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nrr 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Long live CDC Update!

Yes! It's one of those things I've carried over to bitty box distributed environments.

> You posted before Steve's response[0]. Does that help?

It does a little, yeah, but I'll admit that I still feel somewhat teased by it rather than properly informed. As I wrote, I'm close enough to the technical details of this problem that I'm able to use my imagination. I wouldn't be surprised if some of my own proposed designs mesh up with what Steve and co. are doing.

I just want some more concrete messaging "from the horse's mouth," as it were, about what's being undertaken to mitigate shortcomings in Git's architecture for folks in the enterprise space of technology and procurement stripes alike who might find it an interesting contrast to GitHub Enterprise.

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steveklabnik 2 days ago | parent [-]

Certainly meant to be more of a teaser. We’ll get there.

It’s very possible some of your proposals are similar, I’m not familiar with them specifically so I can’t say. But there’s just a lot of stuff that’s already working in existing systems that just hasn’t been productized because those companies aren’t trying to get into the version control business.

If you’re familiar with citc/commit cloud, for example, we’ll be doing something along those lines. We think that workflow is very valuable for people.

We certainly know that people will want to know more details before they buy, and have shared stuff with prospective customers during the POC process. We’ll be more generally open about it over time.

	▲	nrr 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> It’s very possible some of your proposals are similar, I’m not familiar with them specifically so I can’t say. If I can ever get around to writing about it or polishing up what I have enough that I feel comfortable with someone else looking at it, I'll poke you directly about some of what I've been working on over on the Fossil side of things. > If you’re familiar with citc/commit cloud, for example, we’ll be doing something along those lines. Oh, hey, yeah. I'm not first-hand familiar with that tooling (I've never been at Google), but there's a similar(-ish) workflow I've been kind of missing from Plan 9, so I've been hammering on that a little. Something like `m1 client connect $remote_url --name $client_name` and `m1 workspace bind M: --client_name $client_name --name $workspace_name`, which is a slightly more obtuse take on running `9fs` to authenticate and bind the sources server into the current namespace. I've found that, at the time of a client connecting, there's a lot of value for me in having, like, the last however many commit manifests and seldom much else as far as file data goes. I can pull down the raw blocks containing that data on demand, and at least for now, commit manifests contain a complete enumeration of what's in the file tree at that commit. That's enough for me to rehydrate a browsable filesystem projection of the repository before I decide that I need to mirror blocks locally.

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hn_submit 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> For some subset of that everybody, it’s worth paying to have that pain go away.

I guess the question is: is that subset of people large enough to run a profit-making business on?

	▲	rbsmith 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		If you don't know otherwise, then no. Version control has always been a small market, and with Git, it's harder, because that sweet spot has been removed. If you have some great reasons to say yes (Perforce, GitButler, ERSC) such as better technology targeting some industry, 2-way bridge to Git and connections in a market, then you wouldn't be listening to me.

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sublinear 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Once again, what is that "pain" exactly?

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rbsmith 2 days ago | parent [-]

Depends on the industry and specifics of a company. Are they game developers with multiple sites? Is the customer a large company with a lot of vendor relationships using different systems? Are they a vendor of some customizable component used by many large companies? Is there a good integration with their bug tracking? Do they need to long term support of 25 years? Pain was in some part of their process that was constrained, maybe technical (workflow or integrations), maybe legal.

If Git works well enough, great! If not, maybe a different system fits better[0].

[0] - https://www.inkandswitch.com/project/backstitch/

	▲	ocodo 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		.... this is such a fantastically enlightening set of replies rbsmith. outstanding.

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giveupyousuck 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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