alt Hacker NewsI’m very excited to see the great work ERSC has/will do. When thinking about where Git lags today, I’ve come up with three categories: UX features and custom data not natively understood by the Git CLI, a stock git-http-backend that doesn’t scale well to moderate monorepo size in server compute / storage, and a wire protocol that isn’t as flexible as it could be for special requests.
But there are so many hooks into the Git workflow today, and I’m struggling to find a “user story” that would not be met by custom Git tooling. UX could be added to Git objects à la Gerrit with custom CLIs, custom Gitoxide ODB and (eventually) ref storage backends can help the server scale, and things like promisor remotes and partial clones can keep things smaller on the client side.
I’m curious what ERSC is able to share publicly about where the scaling fails with the Git specification? Is it the wire format, or the relative speed of upstreaming new things to Git? Or is the side-channel approach for storing rich data in Git objects insufficient in some way?
P.S. I wrote a blog post[1] about this a bit ago. I’m sure I’m missing something. Since I wrote it, I’ve wondered if the lack of deferred conflicts in-tree would be a scaling limiter.
Thanks!
Yes, it's important to realize that git is multiple things: the on-disk repo format, the CLI, and the wire protocol. Each has their own challenges, just like any project, but they can be tackled independently. But at the end of the day, there just are fundamental limits to the way that git does things that make total sense in the context Linus developed git for, but just do not in other ones. Some of those are performance related, but some of those are things like how the kernel is an open source project, and so per-directory ACLs are something that git wouldn't ever bother supporting, but are valuable for companies. We'll be talking about these things in the future, so I'm just going to be hand-wavy about it right now. But we do think that git is a really great system that has served us all well for 20 years, but just like how git displaced systems before it due to significantly re-thinking the details, for some users, making meaningful improvements over git will also require a similar significant re-think. That's just the way of technological development.