alt Hacker News“It never works out” - hmm, seems like it worked out just fine, worked great to get the operation of the ground and when scale became an issue it was solvable by moving to something else. It served its purpose, sounds like it worked out to me.
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When you start out with a store like git, with file system semantics and a client that has to be smart to handle all the compare and merge operations, then it’s practically impossible to migrate a large client base to a new protocol. Takes years lots of user complaints to and random breakage.
Much better to start with an API. Then you can have the server abstract the store and the operations - use git or whatever - but you can change the store later without disrupting your clients.
Nooo you don’t get it - it didn’t scale from 0 to a trillion users so it’s a garbage worthless system that “doesn’t scale”.
I couldn't agree more strongly. There is a huge opportunity to make git more effective for this kind of use-case, not to abandon it. The essay in question provides no compelling alternative; it therefore reaches an entirely half-baked conclusion.
You appear to have glossed over the two projects in the list that are stuck due to architectural decisions, and don't have any route to migrate off of git-as-database?