Evo: Version control that works the way you think
github.com44 points by todsacerdoti 11 hours ago
44 points by todsacerdoti 11 hours ago
Oh this project again, author was getting absolutely shredded on the Go subreddit earlier today for having no clue what he is building
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/1i6v9ou/evo_a_new_v...
Thanks for the heads up, there are indeed incredibly bad things in that project as linked by the top comment (with the simple word "bruh...") : https://github.com/crazywolf132/evo/blob/15d2ec6e821ef221961...
It is scary that someone can say it is "encrypting" a private key by applying a simple XOR.
Also :
"File-Based Index: We track file hashes in a small JSON index instead of re-hashing everything on every commit or switch. This makes commits and merges faster because Evo only re-hashes files if it notices a changed modtime"
Using modtime is not a good idea at all, this is very telling about how much author knows about different workflow. For those who don't know : you can have remotely mounted files where your machine and the server time is different (happens to me and realized that makefile is modtime based and it creates problem), also obviously clock can change and you do not want your version control system to be blind on changed file, ever.
He made a fix in https://github.com/crazywolf132/evo/commit/2452bec536d9b4d60... but he converted the indentation at the same time, and does not PRs at all. It's dangerous amateur stuff.
Maybe someone could politely explain it to him then instead of the condescending, alienating snark for which the computing community is infamous.
There's a Rust project (used to be OCaml iirc) that aims to be a better Git, it's called Pijul.
https://nest.pijul.com/pijul/pijul (self hosted, thus not on Github)
It uses the interesting Sanakirja db engine:
https://pijul.org/posts/2021-02-06-rethinking-sanakirja
https://docs.rs/sanakirja/1.0.1/sanakirja
When I look at the design goals of Evo, it seems to be more on the user ergonomics side. There have been many attempts to fix Git's UX; so there is probably some things about Git's UX that can be improved.
I find the "why" points not appealing to me (maybe I know my way around git too much), but one:
"Partial clones Commutation makes it possible to clone only a small subset of a repository: indeed, one can only apply the changes related to that subset. Working on a partial clone produces changes that can readily be sent to the large repository. "
OK, now I am interested.
> I find the "why" points not appealing to me
I yearn for Pijul every time I want to submit multiple dependent PRs to github and then fix any not-last one in the chain.
Actually I'm not sure if it'd help at all with the github part, but at least rebasing all this wouldn't be a horror.
I'm definitely interested in the promise here. But it seems very early days.
I'm sceptical about the whole "make a workspace for a feature, then code, then merge" workflow. For me in practice work often doesn't follow that linear path, I don't really know what feature will be finished and ready for committing until done.
One very surprising thing I have learnt about git is that it is intuitive for some people. Whereas maybe half of its users, including me, will never really get it, even after decades of use. So I am also skeptical about broad claims of intuitiveness.
I think the problem of creating a truly user friendly distributed version control system CLI is enormously challenging and requires a lot of deep thought if it is going to meet the needs of a wide range of software development practices. Looking at the DESIGN.md does not convince me they have gone deep enough in that analysis. It has a bit of a blase "it's just common sense that it should work like this!" and I'm pretty certain it's not so easy.
I think they may be too quickly assuming that there's never a need for long-lived branches. For example, for any company (like mine) that does on-prem deployments, we need to support old versions for an extended period of time by backporting security and bug fixes. This is naturally supported in git by creating a branch for each release, and I'd be curious how evo is thinking about that problem.
I’m skeptical of anything that assumes a single branch/workspace per feature.
My career never has worked that way. I’m always juggling a series of changes that will be reviewed and merged in close succession but separately.
I keep everything in a single branch and have scripts to cherry pick revisions for merge requests.
These are called stacked branches in git. You're possibly looking for:
git rebase --update-refs
Yeah. I do wish git added multiple named stages to keep this sort of thing a lot more organized.
Perforce can have multiple active CLs but they can only hold changes at the file level instead of hunks. That ends up even more maddening somehow.
> Yeah. I do wish git added multiple named stages to keep this sort of thing a lot more organized.
You mean commits? You know that you can easily edit, reorder, squash, split, rename and reorganize them into separate branches before you push them anywhere, right?
This appears to either be a wrapper around an incomplete minimal subset of git commands (with git-lfs also included) focused only on the standard feature-branch trunk-based development workflow, or an unecessary rewrite of an inciplete subset. Either way, the semantics are identical, and most of the command are identical (except when some are renamed unnecessarily).
This is missing most of the necessary commands for when you collaborate, e.g. my remote has changes I don't have, but I also have changes it doesn't have, and the two conflict. Or to bring your feature branch ("workspace") up to date relative to the target branch so you can publish the difference for someone to review. Merge/Rebase up to date relative to a target branch is often non-trivial in real world scenarios and is part of what a code review expects to cover.
The "headline"(?) feature seems to be structural merging of JSON and YAML, which is a lesser version of semantic merging that other tools for use with git already provide.
Cute, but just use jj. It has all the features evo promises (plus undo and first-class conflicts) but is robust, refined, and ready to use today. Structural merges sound like an anti-feature.
Darcs was probably the most interesting VCS in this space. It made a lot more sense because it was more about managing patches (or features) instead of history that we do now with git.
IIRC Darcs had a lot of momentum with it until there was a problem discovered with it's algebra that allowed itself to go into an infinite loop. And then it died.
At least with git, I can think in terms of DAGs which should be in the knowledge of any serious senior software engineer.
I don't know if managing patches makes more sense than managing revisions. The truth is that you need both.
Sometimes you are authoring patches, and reviewing patches. But sometimes you are releasing/trying/building revisions, and you are releasing revisions.
Moving to the dual representation fixes some issues and brings its own. I think the only reason why some people think it is better is because they haven't used it long enough to get frustrated by the new issues, the way they had time to be frustrated by the old dual issues.
I don't know either.
Managing patches or features seems to be easier to think about: "I want feature X in this build but not Y for reasons even though Y was in the last build..."
But language (software or otherwise) doesn't really work that way.
You could imagine a novel written using a VCS where in one branch of the novel a main character lives throughout the novel dying at the end. In another branch, that character dies in chapter 1. Now try to merge the two branches automatically.
Sure, you might get a novel, but the character lives on after chapter 2 nonsensically.
That's the same issue with programming languages. "Syntax" is not the same as "Functionally Coherent".
IMO managing revisions makes more sense than managing patches. Yes yes, I know about commutative patches and all that, and no I don't need that. I do reorder patches sometimes, and when they yield the same tree that's interesting, but not that interesting.
You need both. Even with Git (a snapshot-based system), some commands take a hash as a revision and some take a hash as a change (e.g. checkout/rebase/reset/bisect vs cherry-pick/revert/amend). You'll hear both in common parlance too ("this commit doesn't pass tests"/"this commit is deployed"/"rebase onto this commit" vs "I did the last commit"/"this commit is too big"/"that commit broke X").
You really have to think of commits as both, neither view is entirely sufficient.
For people looking at Darcs, Pijul[0] is an interesting advancement in the space, as it solves the exponential merge time problem that can make Darcs intractable.
Sadly Pijul also doesn't have the consistent maintenance one would like to see from a daily-driver VCS.
From a cursory read of the readme and design documents, it looks to me the key point about Evo is a different use of existing concepts, like branches, merges, etc. rather than new concepts. I guess if you want ephemeral branches, nobody stops you from using git in that way, too. A wrapper around git would solve the remaining propositions, that is a better command syntax.
I struggled to understand git until I tried "gitless"[1], a wrapper around git that lets you focus on your workflow ignoring git's own weirdness. For example, switching to another branch automatically checks out the active commit of that branch. This is what you want most of the time: you don't switch branch and then don't even look at the code in that branch, do you?
Unfortunately gitless doesn't seem maintained anymore...
I was intrigued but... What does this even mean? "switching to another branch" is the same thing as "checking out the active commit of that branch" in git.
> For example, switching to another branch automatically checks out the active commit of that branch. This is what you want most of the time: you don't switch branch and then don't even look at the code in that branch, do you?
> For example, switching to another branch automatically checks out the active commit of that branch.
git switch $BRANCHIt would help a lot to post a video or gif, showing how it deals with 3 features being merged with a lot of conflicts. It really has potential to be awesome, but you gotta show how.
> evo workspace merge
wtf does that even do. I have no idea if it does what I think because I have no idea what it does.
'push' is a hundred times more clear than this obscure incantation.
"evo workspace merge" maps[0] to "git merge"
[0]: https://github.com/crazywolf132/evo/blob/main/docs/migration...
Love how a competitor to git was published on GitHub
Git works the way I think it does, because I bothered to learn how it works. Be like me, learn how things work.
That sure is a reasonable-looking user interface.
LICENSE 404, though Readme says MIT.
Obligatory link to https://pijul.org/ which I’d say also fits the description - in which you really commit patches instead of whole trees.
> No more merge conflicts that make you want to quit programming.
Ctrl + W
> Large file support built-in
You've got my attention.
How does "bringing 2 copies into 1" (aka merge) work?
For big media files, lock / last timestamp is OK.
...but is there anything that helps merge changes in text? Not saying lock/timestamp for *everything* is bad, but IMHO, intelligent auto-merge of text is a main reason git is good.