Unorthodocs: Abandon your DVCS and Return to Sanity

jeremy · 03-03-2015, 10:49 AM

Quote:

Hi. My name is Benjamin, and I’m a DVCS apologist.

I’ve pretty much always been a DVCS apologist. I know quite a few people who’ve been using DVCSes since Mercurial and Git, and a few who go back to BitKeeper, but I can totally out-hipster you. I was there for Monotone. I actually remember struggling to grok tla, and being happy that someone took the time to write baz. I remember the promise and the failure that was Darcs. I remember thinking that even Darcs was comically primitive, because it was nothing but a poor imitation of Smalltalk DVCSes like Monticello, themselves mere iterative improvements on classic Smalltalk changesets.1

You merely adopted the DVCS. I was born into it, molded by it. I didn’t see CVS until I was already a man2; by then it was nothing to me but a cause for self-inflicted blunt force trauma to the head.3

To me, the arrival of Git and Mercurial was a godsend, not because it was radically different than what I was used to, but because it finally meant that I had a sufficiently advanced general-purpose DVCS that I at last could obliterate the use of Subversion, CVS, that thingie that Microsoft made before TFS4, and anything else that might cross my path, and replace them with Mercurial (or, in a truly desperate situation, Git) goodness. Hell, I built a whole product centralized around making DVCSes easy and simple to use, and then went on the lecture circuit explaining how to best use them in your workflow.

These aren’t the droids you’re looking for

Somewhere along the way, I think I lost sight of the forest for the trees. I was so actively trying to argue why DVCSes were so superior to the existing centralized source control systems that we had that I never really stopped that long to think about if maybe, just maybe, they in fact weren’t well suited to every single situation that involved source code.

And as a result of the efforts of people like me, we’re now seeing some truly insane “best practices” in the name of adopting Git.5 And mind you, we insist they’re “best practices”; they’re not workarounds, oh no, they’re what you should have been doing since the beginning.

Today, I’m putting my foot down. I helped start this nonsense, so I’m going to help stop it. If a DVCS is great for your workflow, fine. If the trade-offs it imposes are good for you, great. But let’s stop claiming that they’re free, because they have a cost, and the cost is sometimes not worth it.

More at bitquabit...

Where do you stand in the VCS vs DVCS debate?

--jeremy

dugan · 03-03-2015, 11:18 AM

Quote:

In Git, for example, directories (which Git, in what I assume is a nod to ecoterrorists, calls trees)

Well, that sentence tells you everything you need to know about how to evaluate that painful collection of mixed metaphors. Seriously, does writing get any worse? To people like me, there is an obvious technical reason why git calls directories trees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_%28data_structure%29

Note that in the "project with lots of large blobs" special-case that he's obsessing with (and the vast majority of these special cases are not open source projects), the SCM used is typically Perforce. If your budget can afford that much content creation and the servers to support it, you can afford Perforce licenses.

I'd also like to make clear just how special that special case is. Git may not scale to being an asset manager for either Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare or a Pixar movie (both of which are measured in petabytes), but Unreal Tournament 4 is using it just fine.