Are you guys fine with these new shenanigans from Github. I found a bug and wanted to check what has been the development on that, only to find out most of the discussion was hidden by github and requesting me to sign-in to view it.

It threw me straight back to when Microsoft acquired Github and the discussions around the future of opensource on a microsoft owned infrastructure, now microsoft is exploiting free work from the community to train its AI, and building walls around its product, are open source contributors fine with that ?

  • rah
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    8 months ago

    The two big contenders are Darcs … Darcs … has some performance issues (where some of the old perf issues are fixed, some remain)

    If Darcs has performance issues, how is it better than git?

    • toastal@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      In many scenarios you probably won’t notice… but also Pijul has ‘fixed’ that fundamental perfomance issue. The Patch Theory states that patches, without depending patches that would cause a conflict, should commute—i.e. patch α + patch β ≡ patch β + patch α in the same way 1 + 4 ≡ 4 + 1 (order does not matter, output is equivalent). What this eliminates is an entire class of merge conflicts & opens up new ways to handle diffing. This particular class of conflicts makes it easier to work in a distributed project as anyone can pull in anyone else’s patch at different times in project without conflicts. In practice with Git being snapshot-based & patch order mattering, this tends to cause folks to rely on a centralized, canonical Git server to merge into to be able to ask what the order should be so everyone doesn’t get stuck in their rebases/pulls (rerere fails a lot).

      It turns out there is more to version control than how fast CPU go; if we measured programming languages with the same stick, we’d all only write assembly since everything else has a performance penalty.

      • rah
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        8 months ago

        The Patch Theory

        The way you write about this seems very evangelical.

        patches, without depending patches that would cause a conflict, should commute

        get stuck in their rebases/pulls

        I use git every day and I don’t recall patch ordering ever being a problem.

        • toastal@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          Evangelical in that it’s documented as a theory & a paper for the concepts you can read about? Communicative properties are common in math–what’s novel is applying those properties to patches for source control compared to the older models.

          I use git every day and I don’t recall patch ordering ever being a problem

          Have you worked in a distributed team sharing just patches over email? If Alice pulls from Bob & then Catherine, but David reads & applies Catherine’s then Bob’s, Alice & David now have a conflict in the ordering when trying to push/pull later. I have ran into this. Or did you use a centralized, canonical (therefore not distributed) Git server with a pull request model? If you do the latter, you won’t run into the issue but you also aren’t using the distributed part of a distributed version control system (DVCS)–& most don’t since has too many issues with snapshot-based tools. This restricts the sorts of systems & team structures for source control we can even do (you need a Tvoralds dictator even for Linux’s mailing list) & we can’t really think outside the snapshot-limitations until we step outside of that snapshot bubble.

          • rah
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            8 months ago

            Evangelical in that it’s documented as a theory & a paper for the concepts you can read about?

            No, evangelical as in needing to tell people about it, even when they have no interest.

            Have you worked in a distributed team sharing just patches over email?

            No.

            • toastal@lemmy.ml
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              8 months ago

              https://feddit.uk/comment/8692603

              You literally asked what I suggested. And I’m trying to do my due diligence in raising awareness for ideas I find compelling since these alternatives have yet to be any many folks’ radars …VCSs that solve issues you have yet to run into, but might someday & now you might remember you once heard about a solution online.