[mbeavitt]

Just curious - what do you see as being a viable alternative to the current git paradigm?

[edent]

I'm playing about with collaborative code editors at the moment. See https://mastodon.social/@Edent/114862593530392361

I want an experience more like Google Docs and less like emailing diffs to a mailing list.

[jstanley]

Having a private local copy of the codebase is a feature. It means I can make whatever changes I want to the code without anybody else even knowing. And once I've finished mucking about with it and learning what I need to do, I can tidy it up into something I'm ready for other people to look at.

Not having a private playground is one of the big drawbacks of all the modern cloud SaaS stuff. If I want to play around and learn something, suddenly that affects everyone else. It shouldn't.

[mbeavitt]

I can't imagine the horror of tracking down a regression and finally fixing it, only to find someone else edited another section of the codebase, ruining all my efforts.

This is fine in text documents (to an extent, obviously references to sections of text that no longer exist can happen) because different sections are not as inextricably linked to each other.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Once everyone is done collaboratively editing, how do you control changes to the file in actual source control (in other words, commit a known configuration and receive formal,audit-sufficient approval from others to integrate the changes into source control)?

[HPsquared]

How do you test something if multiple people are making changes at the same time?

[retsibsi]

Yeah I was just about to ask the same thing! I'm a bit of a luddite, maybe, in that I tend to prefer what I'm already used to -- but I can generally see the other side of the argument. When it comes to git, though, I genuinely don't get what is being proposed as the alternative, let alone why it would be an improvement.

edit: I've see the author's reply, and I guess the original piece was mainly a call to develop better ways of doing things, rather than a claim that they already exist and we should hurry up and start using them. I'd still be interested in more detail on what is fixably wrong with git, though (as opposed to the annoyances that are corollaries of necessary features)

[slowcache]

I was also wondering this. I don't want my codebase to be a shared word document, how will it ever be in a compilable state?

[Retr0id]

The idea of google-docs-like collaborative code editing is intriguing, but it's hard to imagine it being practical. I could see it working quite nicely for e.g. pair programming on a feature branch, but at some point you need to merge that branch.

[klabb3]

Sounds like the author is advocating for SVN.