Doesn't seem like they want VCS in traditional sense anyway. More like a collaborative undo history with emphasis on CRDT?
replyI don't think Git/GitHub is really all that big of a lock-in in practice for most projects.
replyIMO Git is not an unassailable juggernaut - I think if a new SCM came along and it had a frontend like GitHub and a VSCode plugin, that alone would be enough for a many users to adopt it (barring users who are heavy customers of GitHub Actions). It's just that nobody has decided to do this, since there's no money in it and most people are fine with Git.
The wall of getting buy in for switching your company over to a new SCM is much higher if you need to move everything over to a new system and switch over all of your developers onto new software at the same time. And if things don't work out you have to do the same expensive process in reverse. On the other hand if you have git compatibility you can start with a small group of developers being able to try out the tool first and see if it is actually beneficial and work your way spreading it through the company. If it turns out the new thing isn't good it is trivial to go back to your old tools since you did not have to do expensive migrations.
replyBased on reading this, I don't see anything that would prevent keeping track of a repo tracked by this database with Git (and therefore GitHub) in addition to the database. I think the "compatible" bit means more that you have to think in terms of Git concepts everywhere.
replyCurious what the author thinks though, looks like it's posted by them.
Technically, exporting changes either way is not a challenge. It only becomes difficult if we have multiple gateways for some reason.
replyOne way to do it is to use the new system for the messy part and git/GitHub for "publication".
A system as described could be forwards compatible with git without being backwards compatible with git. In other words let people migrate easily, but don't force the new system to have all the same flaws of the old
replyWhat issues do you see in git's data model to abandon it as wire format for syncing?
replyI wouldn't say I want to abandon anything git is doing as much as evolve it. Objects need to be able to contain syntax tree nodes, and patches need to be able to target changes to particular locations in a syntax tree instead of just by line/col.
replyAn AST is a tree as much as the directory structure currently encoded in git.
replyIt shouldn't be hard to build a bijective mapping between a file system and AST.
Right, but for what purpose? I don't see much gain, and now you're left trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The git CLI would be technically working, but not practically useful. Same with an IDE: if you checked the files out you could technically open them but not easily change your program.
replythe git server would continue to work.
replyThe cli really isn't the greatest either way. But there's lots of infrastructure to make the sharing work reasonably well.