Re: [DISCUSSION] Growing the Git community

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email>
Date: Sep 25, 2019, 14:14 UTC
Message-ID: <b6835484-62a4-6f89-b6b1-f43afe794272@iee.email>
In-Reply-To: <CAJ+soVcmMwy7GgLcV-m1kNEsHYirHMQQeFuEYZanbCNUK4_zHg@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Pierre,

On 25/09/2019 14:36, Pierre Tardy wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

>>> As a community, our number one goal is for Git to continue to be the best
>>> distributed version control system. At minimum, it should continue to be
>>> the most widely-used DVCS.
>> I'd rather we stated our goal in terms of what problems we are trying
>> to address rather than accolades we want sent our way.  E.g. "Our goal
>> is to make developers more productive by providing them increasingly
>> useful version control software".
>>
> Agreed.
> And why restrict on DVCS?
> Isn't it admitted that the distributed version control is nowadays
> much better in term of software productivity?
> Is there some use cases that "traditional" centralized VCS are better
> on, and on which we gave up as a goal?
>
> Regards,
> Pierre

As an old engineer, I do remember and still see the vast range of areas where the Git DVCS is probably never going to help because it doesn't solve the engineering issues that regular VCS (e.g. Mil-Std-498) have solved for generations...

What modern computing, Linux style, has is:
- Perfect replication, at near zero cost or time.
- Line oriented, Source code based basis.
- Computational efficiency, at near zero cost or time.
- Crypto-algorithms at strength.

If we go outside those areas we are less and less likely to manage. (digital video? Every binary to be serialised? bit rot resilience? traceability?).

We do have some Elephants in the room regarding What the community is about (limits and goals), as distinct from How we conduct ourselves (CoC), but that probably should be separated out.