dud VS null

I've used DVC in the past and generally liked its approach. That said, I wholeheartedly agree that it's clunky. It does a lot of things implicitly, which can make it hard to reason about. It was also extremely slow for medium-sized dataset (low 10s of GBs).

In response, I created a command-line tool that addresses these issues[0]. To reduce the comparison to an analogy: Dud : DVC :: Flask : Django.

[0]: https://github.com/kevin-hanselman/dud

There is also https://github.com/kevin-hanselman/dud

I very much agree with you about DVC's feature creep. The other issue I have with it is speed. DVC has left me scratching my head at its sluggishness many times. Because of these factors, I've been working on an alternative that focuses on simplicity and speed[0]. My tool is often five to ten times faster than DVC[1]. I'd love to hear what you think.

[0]: https://github.com/kevin-hanselman/dud

[1]: https://kevin-hanselman.github.io/dud/benchmarks/

I don't know about replacing Make with Docker, but I use the two together to good effect. One of my favorite hacks is adding a 'docker-%' rule in my Makefile to run make commands in a Docker image[1]. It's a bit mind-bending, and there's a few gotchas, but it works surprisingly well for simple rules.

[1]: https://github.com/kevin-hanselman/dud/blob/e98de8fcdf7ad564...

Thanks for sharing your experience. It's non-trivial and surprising behavior like this that drove me to build a custom system[0] myself. When I started researching version control tools for large files, I remember feeling like git-annex and Git LFS were awkwardly bolted onto Git; Git simply wasn't designed for large files. Then I found DVC[1], and its approach rang true for me. However, after using DVC for a year or so, I grew tired of DVC's many puzzling behaviors (most of which are outlined in the README at [0]). In the end, I built the tool I wanted for the job -- one that is exceptionally simple and fast.

[0]: https://github.com/kevin-hanselman/dud

I build a logging library for Go, because I couldn't find one that logs to stdout AND stderr. If you used a logging lib on GCP for example, all log output went into the same pile of junk and it was hard to find "real" errors: https://github.com/emvi/logbuch

Then there is "null", also because I couldn't find one that got both, marshalling to JSON and be able to store null values in db: https://github.com/emvi/null

And finally, our "flagship" open-source project Pirsch, an embedded library for web analytics: https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch