git-branchless VS libgit2

Yes, but due to its simplicity + extensibility + widespread adoption, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re still using Git 100+ years from now.

The current trend (most popular and IMO likely to succeed) is to make tools (“layers”) which work on top of Git, like more intuitive UI/patterns (https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit, https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless) and smart merge resolvers (https://github.com/Symbolk/IntelliMerge, https://docs.plasticscm.com/semanticmerge/how-to-configure/s...). Git it so flexible, even things that it handles terribly by default, it handles

> Is this for a case where a bunch of people branch from master@HEAD (lets call this A), then you need to modify A, so you then need to rebase each branch that branched from A individually?

Mainly it's for when you branch from A multiple times, and then modify A. This can happen if you have some base work that you build multiple features on top of. I routinely do this as part of rapid prototyping, as described here: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/wiki/Workflow:-div...

`git undo` shows a list of operations it'll execute, which you have to confirm before accepting. Of course, it's ultimately a matter of trust in the tools you use.

What happens is you work somewhere that has stacked diffs and suddenly you learn how to shape your diffs to make them easy to review. Thinking of how folks will review your code in chunks while writing it makes it cleaner. Having small but easy to read diffs makes reviews faster and helps junior devs learn how to review.

Sometimes this doesn’t happen in which case you end up need to split your commit at the end. This is where git utterly fails. You end up needing git split and git absorb to make this productive.

Git split let’s you select which chunks in a commit should belong to it and then splits that into a commit and then you do it again and again until you have lots of commits. You’ll still need to probably test each one but the majority of the work is done

Git absorb takes changes on the top of your stack and magically finds which commit in your stack the each chunk should belong to and amends it to the right commit

You also need git branchless https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless as it lets you move up and down the stack without needing to remember so much git arcana.

Everything that is replicated on the network is stored as a Git object, using the libgit2[0] library. This library uses hardened SHA-1 internally, which is called sha1dc (for "detect collision").

[0]: https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/blob/ac0f2245510f6c75db1b...

This is delightful and I can't wait to try it out. Right now, the libgit2 project (https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2) has a custom HTTP git server wrapper that will throttle the responses down to a very slow rate. It's fun watching a `git clone` running over 2400 baud modem speeds, but it's actually been incredibly helpful for testing timeouts, odd buffering problems, and other things that crop up in weird network environments.

I'd love to jettison our hacky custom code and use something off-the-shelf instead.

I've built a UI on top of libgit2 and I wish that this blog post expanded on which new features are missing (sparse checkout?).

To quote: "The migration to Git Executable will allow us to resolve long-standing issues with GitKraken Client, such as poor LFS performance, SSH configuration support and many other features/performance improvements."

I agree on LFS performance on Windows. SSH config support is a pain due to libssh2 but openssh support is on the way (https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/pull/6617).

There are many cons to using the Git executable itself (parsing output, error reporting, version handling). Seems to me that there's more to this?

I'm curious about the license change? This is an executable is it not? Invoking it as a separate process does not require you make the software calling it GPL so switching to MIT should have no affect in the common case.

If the authors really wanted a more permissive license, then instead of relicensing from AGPL to MIT they should have gone AGPL with linking exception. An example of a project that does this is libgit2 [1]. This licensing is more permissive but still permits the author to sell commercial licenses to those making closed-source code changes.

[1] https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2#license

Using libxlsxwriter and libgit, it's straightforward -- just putting the equivalent of git shortlog and lines added and removed into a line of cells.