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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
It 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.
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.
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.
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:
... or a GUI like Git Cola that does this for you by default.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?
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.
https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj
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.
Darcs was also very very slow when I used it.
It 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...
That sure is a reasonable-looking user interface.
LICENSE 404, though Readme says MIT.
> 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.