So nice to see this get picked up, and honestly surprised to see the interest in what I think of as an extremely esoteric area. Few things:<p>- Just released an Edition 1.1 that fixed some small errors, amended a few chapters content, and removed some general bluster. I'm going to try and, well, version these.<p>- New things are coming to Git, and I suspect I'll be talking about Git Futures or A Post-Git World soon enough.<p>- There's now a free PDF, <a href="https://gitperf.com/pdf.html" rel="nofollow">https://gitperf.com/pdf.html</a><p>- I'll have a couple more highly practical chapters coming soon, focused on pragmatic organizational adoption, e.g., on wrapping the git CLI to best practices
I never faced git performance issues when working with code. Guess my repos weren't bit. But when I tried to use git as a versioned database of changes in my pet project, I learned a lot about indexes, compacting, etc. Article covers a lot and is very helpful!
Surprise, surprise, another piece of LLM-generated slop on the front page of HN.<p>From chapter 1:<p>> When Git slows down, engineers adapt in bad ways. They stop asking questions the history could answer. They batch work to avoid sync cost. They keep messy branches alive longer, postpone cleanup, and treat the repository like something slightly dangerous.<p>From <a href="https://gitperf.com/epilogue.html" rel="nofollow">https://gitperf.com/epilogue.html</a><p>> Once machines start producing code at machine cadence, the model from this book does not break. What changes is the pace: more branches, more commits, more automation, and more surrounding metadata. The traffic gets louder, and the features that keep Git legible under pressure move from "nice to have" to "essential."<p>> These stop looking like side optimizations. They are what keep machine-scale Git traffic usable.
I had the same thought. TBH there is nothing in those individual sentences that read like AI but when you read them all together I could see it too. I dunno what it is, only way I can describe it is that it does not sound like a normal human but rather a monologue from a character trying to sound impressive with each successive sentence.
Although this LLMisms also still stand out to me, I find them bearable as the glue part of this kind of technical/white paper like content.<p>Maybe I'm already lost in the AI psychosis, maybe some of us are in a transition phase trying to separate from pure synthetic "unmanned slop" to "acceptable slop", maybe someone could derive the same or more value getting the prompts that hold the industry experience the author seems to hold and pointing them to the git codebase/docs herself...<p>In my case (not seriously engaged in git performance since my git game is trivial) I find the explanations from the sections I have limited knowledge of to be very informative.
Similarly, if not performance-focused, I can wholeheartedly recommend Building Git[0], which walks you through building your own git clone in Ruby (although the language is immaterial).<p>[0]: <a href="https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/" rel="nofollow">https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/</a>
Git is industry standard, because for what it give you it's a remarkably robust and simple program <i>to use</i>. We're all vaguely aware that the internals are complex, but the UX is clean and usable enough that the complexity usually doesn't leak out.<p>But the day this breaks down and I have to deal with bloom filters, packfiles, maintaining the git garbage collector or rerere cleanup, is the day I switch our codebase to a centralized VCS.<p>This stuff is cool to learn about; but it's 5 layers removed from anything I want to be thinking about in my day to day work.
i think it is the other way around. Git is pretty simple internally, and its ui is just knobs and levers to reach into that simple reliable internal structure. This is why for some people it seems like a mess - they want button "do what I want" (and all people and their needs are different), and for other people it's clean - open the throttle, engine will rev.
Agree, the insides are fairly simple and cleanly designed, you could explain exactly how almost everything works in a 1 hour presentation, and most people will grok the main ideas fairly easily.<p>The tooling on top is inconsistent and kind of messy though, and harder to explain than the internals. I recall hearing somewhere that the tooling we see today as the user tooling was really supposed to just be the tooling for messing with git directly, with the expectation that something would sit above and make it actually user-friendly. I don't remember where I recall this from though, so could be just a post-justification from my own brain to explain the situation :)
> Git is pretty simple internally, and its ui is just knobs and levers to reach into that simple reliable internal structure.<p>that's not true either. originally it was simple internally - it was mostly shell scripts! writing text files! - but now it has all sorts of complicated optimisations.<p>the "middle" is somewhat simple for CS people, though - a graph of commits, you can put labels on them, you can send and receive strict appends to the graph to another repository. both the stuff under and above that is quite complicated in practice, but the UI does continue to improve - e.g. editing a past commit message until the release last week was ... complicated.
I'm pretty sure git is industry standard almost entirely entirely because GitHub exists. And I very much disagree that the UX is clean. The cli is more than a bit of a mess.
> I'm pretty sure git is industry standard almost entirely entirely because GitHub exists.<p>Nah, I remember that time vividly, Github became a thing about a year or two after it was already very much taking the lead.<p>GitHub became GitHub because git was the winner. There were alternative hubs that supported bazaar and mercurial and whatnot, but git won because for most people, Linus and the kernel team being behind it was reason enough to trust it.<p>(and I say this as someone who liked hg more than git)
I mean, I don't think anyone can say for sure if "GitHub became GitHub because git was the winner" or "Git became mainstream because GitHub won the developer mindshare", pretty much everyone I knew used GitHub for everything besides the actual VCS protocol, although a lot of us early users were users of GitHub especially because of git.<p>Most people just wanted to collaborate on the platform other people were on, and where the popular projects were, that it used git was just an implementation detail at that point for most I think.
Git was blazingly fast when it came out, faster than hg (C vs Python) and of course a different order of complexity to svn, which was the actual existing alternative it supplanted.
Anyone who has ever used Mercurial knows very well what a good versioning tool UX looks like...
No. When I left a job using Mercurial, I made a vow never to start a job that used it again. And that employer was seeking to move on from it.
good because clones take forever so you get free time? Good because you need plugins/extension/special-config to support rebase?
> Anyone who has ever used Mercurial knows very well what a good versioning tool UX looks like...<p>So true. I used Mercurial back in the day and also used Darcs before it, and it helped me realize that the best versioning tool UX that exists is still the one Git provides.<p>PS: Also CVS, SVN, Perforce, and Clear Case professionally, and gave a try to Fossil. None of them even close to Git usability-wise.
I'm only on to chapter two and already it's explained some plumbing details that I somehow have missed all these years. This is great
> LFS adds its own operational overhead.<p>Seemingly seconds on every remote-touching command, even on a very small repo.
What is worse is that for about half a year or so, I now have to authenticate my ed25519-sk key with my Yubikey thrice (!) when using LFS. On every push.
That they didn't go with git annex was such a fit of NIH of a mistake.
I've been wanting to ask this:<p>Why isn't<p><pre><code> git clone --depth 1 ...
</code></pre>
the default?<p>I would guess that for at least 90% of the repos I clone, I just want to install something. Even for the rest, I might hack on the code but seldom look into the history. If I do then I could do a `git fetch` at that point and save the bandwidth and disk space the rest of the time.
try `git clone --filter=blob:none` instead<p><a href="https://github.blog/open-source/git/get-up-to-speed-with-partial-clone-and-shallow-clone/" rel="nofollow">https://github.blog/open-source/git/get-up-to-speed-with-par...</a><p><a href="https://gitperf.com/chapter-11.html" rel="nofollow">https://gitperf.com/chapter-11.html</a>
A question: why is git involved at all in this? You don't want a repository.
What if that's only you? Git isn't made only for those who "just want to install something"
Fair enough. I also work with a monorepo at work but that I cloned like 5 years ago.<p>If I think about what I've cloned over the last week or so (LazyVim, gstack, my dotfiles), most of the time I just want the current state and be able to pull updates. Even for my dotfiles or projects that I fork and hack on, most of the time I'm just adding commits and it's seldom that I want to go back to historical ones.<p>Given how often I see `git clone ...` instructions in Github README.md files, I was just wondering how many other people felt the same?<p>So my contention is that most of the time, `git clone --depth 1` or `git clone --filter=blob:none` is what you actually want, and in the case that you want the full history then you could do `git clone --depth 0` (or `git clone -full` for even better UX, not that the git cli is known for it's UX).
Its not the default because that'd be counter-productive to developers who use git with larger repositories, which is how git started life in the first place - your clone depth would be entirely useless for Linux kernel developers, for example, if it were default ..
ted nyman: #1 most knowledgable college football fan in sf<p>and also git<p>which makes more sense i guess
Of most things, really, he was on Jeopardy for a reason! <a href="https://thejeopardyfan.com/tag/ted-nyman" rel="nofollow">https://thejeopardyfan.com/tag/ted-nyman</a>
I've always wanted to see a book that describes git for the common man and gives them tons of examples for how to use it to do productive things.<p>Even for a small office, git can be immensely useful. Entire production line workflows can be implemented with git .. if only folks would learn to use it productively.<p>Its not just for development. Writers can use it productively. Accountants too.<p>It always kind of irks me that Git hasn't just been folded into the OS front-end UI by any of the OS vendors .. it'd be so revolutionary to give common folks an easy way to manage the timeline/history of their computer use using git.
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The text reads like an LLM was involved in this.