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 ?

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[–] rah@feddit.uk 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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@feddit.uk 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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@feddit.uk 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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 1 points 6 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.