Threads for lim
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One program that I love is Syncthing. Who would’ve guessed that the sentences “continuous peer-to-peer file synchronization” and “it just works” could ever appear together.
One that I certainly couldn’t recommend without caveats but nevertheless makes me very happy is the alternative Discord and Slack client Ripcord. It looks great and presents a remarkably better interface to these two proprietary services. Long may it live.
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caveats
You mean like how if the admins of any of the “servers” you use find out you’re using this on discord, they’re required to narc on you and get your account banned? =(
https://github.com/mk-fg/reliable-discord-client-irc-daemon#more-info-on-third-party-client-blocking.
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That’s a pleasant surprise to hear. I used Syncthing quite heavily a long time ago (6-8 years?) and it worked great up until it didn’t, and then required a lot of manual screwing around or a full repo wipe to get a wedged state un-wedged. Not a common occurrance, but not an uncommon one either. It did what I needed but when I had the opportunity to ditch it and just use a NAS instead I had no regrets. Sounds like it might be worth taking another look at for wandering laptops and such.
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Curious why you need to use the mobile app for your bank? Is this just how it is in the EU? No banking in a web browser?
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Just as a data point it’s almost the only option for my UK bank. There is online banking in a web browser, and it doesn’t need a phone if you have one of those card reader second factor things. But as well as having much more annoying authentication procedures, it’s also just missing certain features. Banks here compete to have good apps, believe it or not, but there doesn’t seem to be any pressure on them to have good web-based banking, and I don’t think mine has made any material improvements to their web thing since banking apps became a thing.
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There is a European Guideline called PSD2 which aimed to liberalise the payment market, forcing banks to provide APIs for their services, but also having companies using those APIs regulated.
Part of the directive are also requirements towards “strong user authentication” and many banks choose to provide the second factor required as part of that through their own apps. SMS authentication is not secure enough as a second factor.
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Are you saying SMS doesn’t fulfill the PSD2 requirements for 2FA?
Exactly, SMS is not considered a secure channel for the purposes of the PSD2.
The SS7 protocol has been severly insecure for quite some time. In fact, NIST originally proposed depecrating SMS 2FA for their original authentication guidelines in publication 800-63-3. The only reason they backpedaled is arguably heavy lobbying by telecoms.
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My bank (in the Netherlands) at least still offers regular web access. They use a smart “reader” device in which you stick your bank card and scan the challenge on the screen. The current version of this device has a colour camera and display, and AFAIK they’re giving them away for free (or at least, I don’t remember paying for mine, and I have two of them).
I imagine that’s rather expensive to maintain though, and they do offer using an app instead of the reader to log in to the website (yeah that’s a bit awkward, they also allow you to just use the app directly without website). So I hope I won’t get excluded in the future by these choices (as I opt not to have a device in my pocket that spies on me 24/7).
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Genuinely devastated by this one. Every usable service I use has been following the usual pattern of being acquired and ruined, but I really thought that Gandi would resist. I’ve been using them for nine years now, and even convinced my company to shift several hundred domains over to them because I’d had such good experience with their interface, support staff, and wanted to support the ethos.
Gandi sent out an email this evening announcing huge price rises as of early April. I don’t know what it’s like for every TLD, but the price of registering a .com is increasing by 20%. I knew this would be coming down the line but christ, they’ve decided to do it straight away.
Gandi’s generally good at communication as well, but there is as yet no announcement that they’ve been sold on any of their usual places as far as I can see. RIP.
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The Windows print server at my university was called
beelzebub. Get you a name that’s cute and descriptive!
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Who owns this? I’m not ready to hand all my DNS queries to third parties.
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Wait where were you sending your DNS queries if not to a third party? Phone book?
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Your caching DNS server queries the authoritative name servers for the names it’s looking for, bootstrapped by the root name servers.
This is what something like dns0.eu is doing, you’re just doing the same thing on a small scale for yourself.
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Yes, and with something like unbound the resource overhead of running your own recursive resolver is so small that you can not only run one for yourself, you can run one locally on each of your machines.
I have mine configured to use 4MiB of RAM, which is low enough that it’s not going to make a difference compared to running a non-recursing stub resolver like systemd-resolved, but high enough to have a very high cache hit rate.
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Wait. This won’t hit, like, my ISP provider? With 4 MB of RAM?
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Honestly, 4 MiB sounds like a lot. DNS queries have got bigger with DNSSEC and have grown CPU overhead for the same reason, but the total state required is well under ten times what it was 20 years ago. DNS only recently moved to TCP, before that every request and response had to fit in a single Internet MTU packet. 4 MiB is a lot of responses at that size. 20 years ago, 16 MiB of total RAM was enough for a caching resolver for a network with a couple of thousand machines, using BIND. Unbound has lower resource requirements than BIND.
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Wait so what happens after your provider? I don’t know anything about DNS /s
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I don’t think you need to get sarcastic on me.
I think that when it comes to DNS the relationship between me and the providers needs to be one of trust.
I trust my provider more than dns0.eu because I have a contractual relationship with them that I can leverage if something goes wrong. I don’t care which upstream DNS they use, because they are the ultimate bearers of responsibility towards me.
I trust opendns more because they have a proven track record and don’t have outside incentives to track my DNS queries.
Do these things make sense to you? They do to me.
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Yeah, I’m with you. DNS-based ad-blocking sure, but not keen on “safe and supervised Internet for kids”. In my experience that can mean anything that isn’t FANG and explicitly approved can get blocked. Or naïve word based blocking that means I can’t visit a Wikipedia page on cryptography because it’s associated with “hacking”. XD
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I’m not sold either, but it’s worth noting they have two different levels of filtering. The “adult” one still has porn, and, potentially, stuff like hacking and so on. To get the extra filter for kids, you need to explicit use the kids DNS url.
I suppose the idea is that parents would put that in the home WiFi, or phones they hand to small children.
Could still be badly used, or even abused, of course.
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more seamless experience
What does that mean? The page does nothing but list ways in which Dropbox is about to get worse that it was before.
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I assume it means you no longer have to jump through the hoops Apple makes you jump through to load third party kernel extensions on macOS. (Or worse, having to work around the fact that the kext in question won’t load at all from 12.3 onwards.)
Or, you know, corporate double-speak.
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You could do it the other way around and style your Atom feed with an XSLT stylesheet to make it look better to humans.
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https://feed.tedium.co/ does that, for example.
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At some point after I left, they stylized the feed at The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/feed/all/
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https://len.falken.directory has been doing this for awhile
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A post about doing just that: https://andrewstiefel.com/style-atom-xsl/. There are also some links to other similar posts at the bottom.
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my personal atom microblogging engine in use at https://mro.name/microblog
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For a more generic solution you can set the Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy header: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy
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quicksilver03
3 months ago
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link
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Moving emails accounts to a new host, imapcopy with actual encryption
The best tool to move IMAP accounts is https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ .
Actual working example, with the host names changed:
imapsync \ --host1 outlook.office365.com \ --ssl1 \ --user1 user1@example.com \ --passfile1 "${CONFDIR}/user1-examplecom-passfile" \ --host2 mail.example.net \ --ssl2 \ --user2 user1@example.net \ --passfile2 "${CONFDIR}/user1-examplenet-passfile" \ --delete2 \ --addheader \ --exclude "(?)Calendar" \ --exclude "(?)Sync Issues" \ --exclude "(?)Deleted Items" \ --exclude "(?)Conversation History" \ --exclude "(?)RSS Feeds" \ --exclude "(?)RSS Subscriptions" \ --noemailreport1 --noemailreport2 \ --logdir "${LOGDIR}" \ --logfile "o365-sync.log"-
imapsync has never failed me. Used it to transfer my backlog of 20 years worth of emails and it did not miss a single one.
It seems the author was confused over its price, which I understand looking at the website. For me it always was available in my distro’s package manager, so is the price listed really only for support and perhaps people on Windows then?
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Officially, a license for the software costs €60. However, you don’t have to look too far on the website to find that there’s a copy sitting in /dist/. And like you say, some package managers (including brew) include it.
The software is released under the No Limit Public License, and there’s this note in the source code:
Gilles LAMIRAL earns his living by writing, installing, configuring and sometimes teaching free, open, and often gratis software. Imapsync used to be “always gratis” but now it is only “often gratis” because imapsync is sold by its author, your servitor, a good way to maintain and support free open public software tools over decades.
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K-9 is probably the best Android email client, which is part of the reason Thunderbird took it over. Why then, is their first instinct to completely redesign something. Just to make their mark? It’s already good, leave it alone :’(
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K-9 has been generally recognized as needing a UI refresh, though. The last time it got an update was around Android 5, so the current UI is based on that Holo design; there have been two generations of Material design since then. The fact that there’s demand for it is shown by the existence of at least two Material forks of K-9. One failed to be complete enough to upstream, the other diverged too much to upstream and leaned heavily into being an encrypted email client.
I agree that too much change just for change’s sake would be bad, but these changes have been a long time coming. It’s worth it to fit in with the rest of the system, and to incorporate modern interface conventions (like swiping to Trash or Archive from the message list). I’m not associated with the K-9 or Thunderbird projects; I’ve just been a K-9 user since Android 4, but have mostly switched to FairMail for mostly UI reasons.
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Does anyone know of any registry operators that aren’t awful greedy monsters? As far as I can see a bunch of the ccTLD operators are cooperatives or not-for-profits (.de’s DENIC, .uk’s Nominet, .eu’s EURid, .scot’s dotScot, etc.) but that’s it.
Even then, Nominet has been full of issues the last decade, and I haven’t been able to find anything to back up dotScot’s not-for-profit status.
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fundació.cat is a non-profit as well, which exists to promote Catalan language and culture via the .cat domain. This isn’t a ccTLD, but an sTLD, but .scot is also not a ccTLD, so I thought it was worth a mention in response to your question.
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All agreed. Anyway, it’s fun keeping an older laptop going. My MacBook Pro has been my one and only since 2013 and I’ve got no plans on giving up on it any time soon. I’ve had the case open more times than I can remember to replace parts and generally give it some love.
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still one of the corner stones of internet operations
Is this true? I’m struggling to think of anything that would be using it in anger these days.
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I find it useful when dealing with bots hitting the site too hard; at least once recently I was able to use it to figure out an IP range was safe to ban.
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Ambient ScotRail Beats is my new favourite thing. Having spent so much of my life listening to these announcements it’s genuinely comforting. 😄
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This is the most vague and ‘vibe-based’ of them all, and is the least important. But I like it when software has a name that has ‘kawaii’ in the acronym or is named after a fictional character or has a name that’s just plain fun. Obsidian also falls in this category; even though I can’t think of how the name relates to note-taking, it’s just a nice name for software.
If I made high quality public tools I would absolutely give them the most embarrassing names possible. Vicious Pumpkin. Daktaklakpak. “Tau is the correct circle constant”. ZZZ, but the first Z must be the American Z and the other two must be the British Zed. This pronunciation will be in the official standard.
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I mean, when it comes to “embarrassing” you can’t really outdo Coq.
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The interface of Git and its underlying data models are two very different things, that are best treated separately.
The interface is pretty bad. If I wasn’t so used to it I would be fairly desperate for an alternative. I don’t care much for the staging area, I don’t like to have to clean up my working directory every time I need to switch branches, and I don’t like how easy it is to lose commit from a detached HEAD (though there’s always
git reflogI guess).The underlying data model however is pretty good. We can probably ditch the staging area, but apart from that, viewing the history of a repository as a directed graph of snapshots is nice. Captures everything we need. Sure patches have to be derived from those snapshots, but we care less about the patches than we care about the various versions we saved. If there’s one thing we need to get right, it’s those snapshots. You get reproducible builds & test from them, not from patches. So I think Patches are secondary. I used to love DARCS, but I think patch theory was probably the wrong choice.
Now one thing Git really really doesn’t like is large binary files. Especially if we keep changing them. But then that’s just a compression problem. Let the data model pretend there’s a blob for each version of that huge file, even though in fact the software is automatically compressing & decompressing things under the hood.
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Do you actually use it, or do you just do
git commit -p, which only happens to use the staging area as an implementation detail?And how do you test the code you’re committing? How do you make sure that the staged hunks aren’t missing another hunk that, for example, changes the signature the function you’re calling? It’s a serious slowdown in workflow to need to wait for CI rounds, stash and rebase to get a clean commit, and push again.
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git add -pto the staging area and then diff it before generating the commit. I guess that could be done without a staging area using a different workflow but I don’t see the benefit (even if I have to check git status for the command every time I need to unstage something (-: )As for testing, since I’m usually using Github I use the PR as the base unit that needs to pass a test (via squash merges, the horror I know). My commits within a branch often don’t pass tests; I use commits to break things up into sections of functionality for my own benefit going back later.
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Just to add on, the real place where the staging area shines is with
git reset -p. You can reset part of a commit, amend the commit, and then create a new commit with your (original) changes or continue editing. The staging area becomes more useful the more you do commit surgery. -
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I guess that could be done without a staging area using a different workflow but I don’t see the benefit
I don’t see the cost.
My commits within a branch often don’t pass tests;
If you ever need to
git bisect, you may come to regret that. I almost never usegit bisect, but for the few times I did need it it was a life saver, and passing tests greatly facilitate it.-
I bisect every so often, but on the squashed PR commits on main, not individual commits within a PR branch. I’ve never needed to do that to diagnose a bug. If you have big PRs, don’t squash, or don’t use a PR-based workflow, that’s different of course. I agree with the general sentiment that all commits on main should pass tests for the purposes of bisection.
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I use git gui for committing, (the built in git gui command) which let’s you pick by line not just hunks. Normally the things I’m excluding are stuff like enabling debug flags, or just extra logging, so it’s not really difficult to make sure it’s correct. Not saying I never push bad code, but I can’t recall an instance where I pushed bad code because of that so use the index to choose parts of my unfinished work to save in a stash (git stash –keep-index), and sometimes if I’m doing something risky and iterative I’ll periodically add things to the staging area as I go so I can have some way to get back to the last known good point without actually making a bunch of commits ( I could rebase after, yeah but meh).
It being just an implementation detail in most of that is a fair point though.
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I personally run the regression test (which I wrote) to test changes.
Then I have to wait for the code review (which in my experience has never stopped a bug going through; when I have found bugs, in code reviews, it was always “out of scope for the work, so don’t fix it”) before checking it in. I’m dreading the day when CI is actually implemented as it would slow down an already glacial process [1].
Also, I should mention I don’t work on web stuff at all (thank God I got out of that industry).
[1] Our customer is the Oligarchic Cell Phone Company, which has a sprint of years, not days or weeks, with veto power over when we deploy changes.
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Author of the Jujutsu VCS mentioned in the article here. I tried to document at https://github.com/martinvonz/jj/blob/main/docs/git-comparison.md#the-index why I think users don’t actually need the index as much as they think.
I missed the staging area for at most a few weeks after I switched from Git to Mercurial many years ago. Now I miss Mercurial’s tools for splitting commits etc. much more whenever I use Git.
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Thanks for the write up. From what I read it seems like with Jujutsu if I have some WIP of which I want to commit half and continue experimenting with the other half I would need to commit it all across two commits. After that my continuing WIP would be split across two places: the second commit and the working file changes. Is that right? If so, is there any way to tag that WIP commit as do-not-push?
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Not quite. Every time you run a command, the working copy is snapshotted and becomes a real commit, amending the precis working-copy commit. The changes in the working copy are thus treated just like any other commit. The corresponding think to
git commit -pisjj split, which creates two stacked commits from the previous working-copy commit, and the second commit (the child) is what you continue to edit in the working copy.Your follow-up question still applies (to both commits instead of the single commit you seemed to imagine). There’s not yet any way of marking the working copy as do-not-push. Maybe we’ll copy Mercurial’s “phase” concept, but we haven’t decided yet.
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Way I see it, the staging area is a piece of state needed specifically for a command line interface. I use it too, for the exact reason you do. But I could do the same by committing it directly. Compare the possible workflows. Currently we do:
# most of the time git add . git commit # piecemeal git add -p . # review changes git commitWithout a staging area, we could instead do that:
# most of the time git commit # piecemeal git commit -p # review changes git reset HEAD~ # if the changes are no goodAnd I’m not even talking about a possible GUI for the incremental making of several commits.
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Personally I use
git add -pall of the time. I’ve simply been burned by the other way too many times. What I want is not to save commands but to have simple commands that work for me in every situation. I enjoy the patch selection phase. More often than not it is what triggers my memory of a TODO item I forgot to jot down, etc. The patch selection is the same as reviewing the diff I’m about to push but it lets me do it incrementally so that when I’m (inevitably) interrupted I don’t have to remember my place.From your example workflows it seems like you’re interested in avoiding multiple commands. Perhaps you could use
git commit -amost of the time? Or maybe add acommit-allalias?-
Never got around to write that alias, and if I’m being honest I quite often
git diff --cachedto see what I’ve added before I actually commit it.I do need something that feels like a staging area. I was mostly wondering whether that staging area really needed to be implemented differently than an ordinary commit. Originally I believed commits were enough, until someone pointed out pre-commit hooks. Still, I wonder why the staging area isn’t at least a pointer to a
treeobject. It would have been more orthogonal, and likely require less effort to implement. I’m curious what Linus was thinking.-
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Hmm, that’s a tough one. Strictly speaking, none. But I can see the benefits.
Take Monocypher for instance: now it’s pretty stable, and though it is very easy for me to type
make testevery time I modify 3 characters, in practice I may want to make sure I don’t forget to do it before I commit anything. But even then there are 2 alternatives:- Running tests on the server (but it’s better suited to a PR model, and I’m almost the only committer).
- Having a pre push hook. That way my local commits don’t need the hook, and I could go back to using the most recent one as a staging area.
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# most of the time
git add .
Do you actually add your entire working directory most of the time? Unless I’ve just initialized a repository I essentially never do that.
Here’s something I do do all the time, because my mind doesn’t work in a red-green-refactor way:
Get a bug report
Fix bug in foo_controller
Once the bug is fixed, I finally understand it well enough to write an automated regression test around it, so go do that in foo_controller_spec
Run test suite to ensure I didn’t break anything and that my new test is green
Add foo_controller and foo_controller_spec to staging area
Revert working copy (but not staged copy!) of foo_controller (but not it’s spec)
Run test suite again and ensure I have exactly one red test (the new regression test). If yes, commit the stage.
If no, debug spec against old controller until I understand why it’s not red, get it red, pull staged controller back to working area, make sure it’s green.
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Yeah, I could probably simulate this by committing halfway through and then doing some bullshit with cherry-picks from older commits and in some cases reverting the top commit but, like, why? What would I gain from limiting myself to just this awkward commit dance as the only way of working? That’s just leaving me to cobble together a workflow that’s had a powerful abstraction taken away from it, just to satisfy some dogmatic “the commit is the only abstraction I’m willing to allow” instinct.
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Do you actually add your entire working directory most of the time?
Yes. And when I get a bug report, I tend to first reproduce the bug, then write a failing test, then fix the code.
Revert working copy (but not staged copy!) of foo_controller (but not it’s spec)
Sounds useful. How do you do that?
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Yes. And when I get a bug report, I tend to first reproduce the bug, then write a failing test, then fix the code.
Right, but that was just one example. Everything in your working copy should always be committed at all times? I’m almost never in that state. Either I’ve got other edits in progress that I intend to form into later commits, or I’ve got edits on disk that I never intend to commit but in files that should not be git ignored (because I still intend to merge upstream changes into them).
I always want to be intentionally forming every part of a commit, basically.
Sounds useful. How do you do that?
git add foo_controller <other files>; git restore -s HEAD foo_controllerand then
git restore foo_controllerwill copy the staged version back into the working set.
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TBH, I have no idea what “git add -p” does off hand (I use Magit), and I’ve never used staging like that.
I had a great example use of staging come up just yesterday. I’m working in a feature branch, and we’ve given QA a build to test what we have so far. They found a bug with views, and it was an easy fix (we didn’t copy attributes over when copying a view).
So I switched over to views.cpp and made the change. I built, tested that specific view change, and in Magit I staged that specific change in views.cpp. Then I commited, pushed it, and kicked off a pipeline build to give to QA.
I also use staging all the time if I refactor while working on new code or fixing bugs. Say I’m working on “foo()”, but while doing so I refactor “bar()” and “baz()”. With staging, I can isolate the changes to “bar()” and “baz()” in their own commits, which is handy for debugging later, giving the changes to other people without pulling in all of my changes, etc.
Overall, it’s trivial to ignore staging if you don’t want it, but it would be a lot of work to simulate it if it weren’t a feature.
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What’s wrong with the staging area? I use it all the time to break big changes into multiple commits and smaller changes.
I’m sure you do – that’s how it was meant to be used. But you might as well use commits as the staging area – it’s easy to commit and squash. This has the benefit that you can work with your whole commit stack at the same time. I don’t know what problem the staging area solves that isn’t better solved with commits. And yet, the mere existence of this unnecessary feature – this implicitly modified invisible state that comes and crashes your next commit – adds cognitive load: Commands like
git mv,git rmandgit checkoutpollutes the state, thengit diffhides it, and finally,git commit --amendaccidentally invites it into the topmost commit.The combo of being not useful and a constant stumbling block makes it bad.
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Using e.g.
hg splitorjj split. The former has a text-based interface similar togit commit -pas well as a curses-based TUI. The latter lets you use e.g. Meld or vimdiff to edit the diff in a temporary directory and then rewrites the commit and all descendants when you’re done.-
That temporary directory sounds a lot like the index – a temporary place where changes to the working copy can be batched. Am I right to infer here that the benefit you find in having a second working copy in a temp directory because it works better with some other tools that expect to work files?
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The temporary directory is much more temporary than the index - it only exists while you split the commit. For example, if you’re splitting a commit that modifies 5 files, then the temporary directory will have only 2*5 files (for before and after). Does that clarify?
The same solution for selecting part of the changes in a commit is used by
jj amend -i(move into parent of specified commit, from working-copy commit by default),jj move -i --from <rev> --to <rev>(move changes between arbitrary commits) etc.
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I use git revise. Interactive revise is just like interactive rebase, except that it has is a
cutsubcommand. This can be used to split a commit by selecting and editing hunks likegit commit -p.Before git-revise, I used to manually undo part of the commit, commit that, then revert it, and then sqash the undo-commit into the commit to be split. The revert-commit then contains the split-off changes.
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I don’t know, I find it useful. Maybe if git built in mercurials “place changes into commit that isn’t the most recent” amend thing then I might have an easier time doing things but just staging up relevant changes in a patch-based flow is pretty straightforward and helpful IMO
I wonder if this would be as controversial if patching was the default
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What purpose does it serve that wouldn’t also be served by first-class rollback and an easier way of collapsing changesets on their way upstream? I find that most of the benefits of smaller changesets disappear when they don’t have commit messages, and when using the staging area for this you can only rollback one step without having to get into the hairy parts of git.
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The staging area is difficult to work with until you understand what’s happening under the hood. In most version control systems, an object under version control would be in one of a handful of states: either the object has been cataloged and stored in its current state, or it hasn’t. From a DWIM standpoint for a new git user, would catalog and store the object in its current state. With the stage, you can stage, and change, stage again, and change again. I’ve used this myself to logically group commits so I agree with you that it’s useful. But I do see how it breaks peoples DWIM view on how git works.
Also, If I stage, and then change, is there a way to have git restore the file as I staged it if I haven’t committed?
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Also, If I stage, and then change, is there a way to have git restore the file as I staged it if I haven’t committed?
Git restore .
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Try testing your staged changes atomically before you commit. You can’t.
A better design would have been an easy way to unstage, similar to git stash but with range support.
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Interesting, that would solve the problem. I’m surprised I’ve not come across that before.
In terms of “what’s wrong with the staging area”, what I was suggesting would work better is to have the whole thing work in reverse. So all untracked files are “staged” by default and you would explicitly un-stage anything you don’t want to commit. Firstly this works better for the 90% use-case, and compared to this workaround it’s a single step rather than 2 steps for the 10% case where you don’t want to commit all your changes yet.
The fundamental problem with the staging area is that it’s an additional, hidden state that the final committed state has to pass through. But that means that your commits do not necessarily represent a state that the filesystem was previously in, which is supposed to be a fundamental guarantee. The fact that you have to explicitly stash anything to put the staging area into a knowable state is a bit of a hack. It solves a problem that shouldn’t exist.
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The way I was taught this, the way I’ve taught this to others, and the way it’s represented in at least some guis is not compatible.
I mean, sure, you can have staged and unstaged changes in a file and need to figure it out for testing, or unstage parts, but mostly it’s
edit->stage->commit->push.That feels, to me and to newbies who barely know what version control is, like a logical additive flow. Tons of cases you stage everything and commit so it’s a very small operation.
The biggest gripe may be devs who forget to add files in the proper commit, which makes
bisecthard. Your case may solve that for sure, but I find it a special case of bad guis and sloppy devs who do that. Also at some point the fs layout gets fewer new files.-
Except that in a completely linear flow the distinction between edit and stage serves no purpose. At best it creates an extra step for no reason and at worst it is confusing and/or dangerous to anyone who doesn’t fully understand the state their working copy is in. You can bypass the middle state with
git add .; git commitand a lot of new developers do exactly that, but all that does is pretend the staging state doesn’t exist.Staging would serve a purpose if it meant something similar to pushing a branch to CI before a merge, where you have isolated the branch state and can be assured that it has passed all required tests before it goes anywhere permanent. But the staging area actually does the opposite of that, by creating a hidden state that cannot be tested directly.
As you say, all it takes is one mistake and you end up with a bad commit that breaks bisect later. That’s not just a problem of developers being forgetful, it’s the bad design of the staging area that makes this likely to happen by default.
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I think I sort of agree but do not completely concur.
Glossing over the staging can be fine in some projects and dev sloppiness is IMO a bigger problem than an additive flow for clean commits.
These are societal per-project issues - what’s the practice or policy or mandate - and thus they could be upheld by anything, even using the undo buffer for clean commits like back in the day. Which isn’t to say you never gotta do trickery like that with Git, just that it’s a flow that feels natural and undo trickery less common.
Skimming the other comments, maybe
jjis more like your suggestion, and I wouldn’t mind “a better Git”, but I can’t be bothered when eg.gitlessiirc dropped the staging and would make clean commits feel like 2003.
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It’s usually not that hard.
https://lobste.rs/s/yi97jn/is_it_time_look_past_git#c_ss5cj3
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Everyone seem to suppose I would like to ditch the workflows enabled by the staging area. I really don’t. I’m quite sure there ways to keep those workflows without using a staging area. If there aren’t well… I can always admit I was wrong.
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Well, what I prize being able to do is to build up a commit piecemeal out of some but not all of the changes in my working directory, in an incremental rather than all-in-one-go fashion (ie. I should be able to form the commit over time and I should be able to modify a file, move it’s state into the “pending commit” and continue to modify the file further without impacting the pending commit). It must be possible for any commit coming out of this workflow to both not contain everything in my working area, and to contain things no longer in my working area. It must be possible to diff my working area against the pending commit and against the last actual commit (separately), and to diff the pending commit against the last actual commit.
You could call it something else if you wanted but a rose by any other name etc. A “staging area” is a supremely natural metaphor for what I want to work with in my workflow, so replacing it hardly seems desirable to me.
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How about making the pending commit an actual commit? And then adding the porcelain necessary to treat it like a staging area? Stuff like
git commit -p fooif you want to add changes piecemeal.-
No. That’s cool too and is what tools like
git reviseandgit absorbenable, but making it an actual commit would have other drawbacks: it would imply it has a commit message and passes pre-commit hooks and things like that. The staging area is useful precisely for what it does now—help you build up the pieces necessary to make a commit. As such it implies you don’t have everything together to make a commit out of it. As soon as I do I commit, then if necessary--ammend,--edit, orgit reviselater. If you don’t make use of workflows that use staging then feel free to use tooling that bypasses it for you, but don’t try to take it away from the rest of us.-
pre-commit hooks
Oh, totally missed that one. Probably because I’ve never used it (instead i rely on CI or manually pushing a button). Still, that’s the strongest argument so far, and I have no good solution that doesn’t involve an actual staging area there. I guess it’s time to change my mind.
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I think the final word is not said. These tools could also run hooks. It may be that new hooks need to be defined.
Here is one feature request: run git hooks on new commit
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I think you missed the point, my argument is that the staging area is useful as a place to stage stuff before things like commit related hooks get run. I don’t want tools like
git reviseto run precommit hooks. When I usegit revisethe commit has already been made and presumably passed precommit phase.-
For the problem that
git revise“bypasses” the commit hook when using it to split a commit, I meant the commit hook (not precommit hook).I get that the staging area lets you assemble a commit before you can run the commit hook. But if this was possible to do statelessly (which would only be an improvement), you could do without it. And for other reasons, git would be so much better without this footgun:
Normally, you can look at
git diffand commit what you see withgit commit -a. But if the staging area is clobbered, which you might have forgot, you also have invisible state that sneaks in!-
Normally, you can look at git diff and commit what you see with git commit -a.
Normally I do nothing of the kind. I might have used
git commit -aa couple times in the last 5 years (and I make dozens to hundreds of commits per day). The stattefullness of the staging area is exactly what benefits my workflow and not the part I would be trying to eliminate. The majority of the time I stage things I’m working on from my editor one hunk at a time. The difference between my current buffer and the last git commit is highlighted and after I make some progress I start adding related hunks and shaping them into commits. I might fiddle around with a couple things in the current file, then when I like it stage up pieces into a couple different commits.The most aggressive I’d get is occasionally (once a month?) coming up with a use for
git commit -u.A stateless version of staging that “lets you assemble a commit” sounds like an oxymoron to me. I have no idea what you think that would even look like, but a state that is neither the full contents of the current file system nor yet a commit is exactly what I want.
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Why deliberately make a mess of things? Why make a discreet concept of a “commit” into something else with multiple possible states? Why not just use staging like it is now? I see no benefit to jurry rigging more states on top of a working one. If the point is to simplify the tooling you won’t get there by overloading one clean concept with an indefinite state and contextual markers like “if commit message empty then this is not a real commit”.
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Empty commit message is how you abort a commit
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Again, what’s the benefit?
Sure, you could awkwardly simulate a staging area like this. The porcelain would have to juggle a whole bunch of shit to avoid breaking anytime you merge a bunch of changes after adding something to the fake “stage”, pull in 300 new commits, and then decide you want to unstage something, so the replacement of the dedicated abstraction seems likely to leak and introduce merge conflict resolution where you didn’t previously have to worry about it, but maybe with enough magic you could do it.
But what’s the point? To me it’s like saying that I could awkwardly simulate
if,whileandforwithgoto, or simulate basically everything with enoughNANDs. You’re not wrong, but what’s in it for me? Why am I supposed to like this any better than having a variety of fit-for-purpose abstractions? It just feels like I’d be tying one hand behind my back so there can be one less abstraction, without explain why having N-1 abstractions is even more desirable than having N.Seems like an “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” desire than anything beneficial, really.
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Again, what’s the benefit?
Simplicity of implementation. Implementing the staging area like a commit, or at least like a pointer to a
treeobject, would likely make the underlying data model simpler. I wonder why the staging area was implemented the way it is.At the interface level however I’ve had to change my mind because of pre-commit hooks. When all you have is commits, and some tests are automatically launched every time you commit anything, it’s pretty hard to add stuff piecemeal.
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Yes, simplicity of implementation and UI. https://github.com/martinvonz/jj (mentioned in the article) makes the working copy (not the staging area) an actual commit. That does make the implementation quite a lot simpler. You also get backups of the working copy that way.
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Simplicity of implementation.
No offence but, why would I give a shit about this? git is a tool I use to enable me to get other work done, it’s not something I’m reimplementing. If “making the implementation simpler” means my day-to-day workflows get materially more unpleasant, the simplicity of the implementation can take a long walk off a short pier for all I care.
It’s not just pre-commit hooks that get materially worse with this. “Staging” something would then have to have a commit message, I would effectively have to branch off of head before doing every single “staging” commit in order to be able to still merge another branch and then rebase it back on top of everything without fucking about in the reflog to move my now-burried-in-the-past stage commit forward, etc, etc. “It would make the implementation simpler” would be a really poor excuse for a user hostile change.
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If “making the implementation simpler” means my day-to-day workflows get materially more unpleasant, the simplicity of the implementation can take a long walk off a short pier for all I care.
I agree. Users shouldn’t have to care about the implementation (except for minor effects like a simpler implementation resulting in fewer bugs). But I don’t understand why your workflows would be materially more unpleasant. I think they would actually be more pleasant. Mercurial users very rarely miss the staging area. I was a git developer (mostly working on
git rebase) a long time ago, so I consider myself a (former) git power user. I never miss the staging area when I use Mercurial.“Staging” something would then have to have a commit message
Why? I think the topic of this thread is about what can be done differently, so why would the new tool require a commit message? I agree that it’s useful if the tool lets you provide a message, but I don’t think it needs to be required.
I would effectively have to branch off of head before doing every single “staging” commit in order to be able to still merge another branch and then rebase it back on top of everything without fucking about in the reflog to move my now-burried-in-the-past stage commit forward
I don’t follow. Are you saying you’re currently doing the following?
git add -p git merge <another branch> git rebase <another branch>I don’t see why the new tool would bury the staging commit in the past. That’s not what happens with Jujutsu/jj anyway. Since the working copy is just like any other commit there, you can simply merge the other branch with it and then rebase the whole stack onto the other branch after.
I’ve tried to explain a bit about this at https://github.com/martinvonz/jj/blob/main/docs/git-comparison.md#the-index. Does that help clarify?
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Mercurial users very rarely miss the staging area.
Well, I’m not them. As somebody who was forced to use Mercurial for a bit and hated every second of it, I missed the hell out of it, personally (and if memory serves, there was later at least one inevitably-nonstandard Mercurial plugin to paper over this weakness, so I don’t think I was the only person missing it).
I’ve talked about my workflow elsewhere in this thread, I’m not really interested in rehashing it, but suffice to say I lean on the index for all kinds of things.
Are you saying you’re currently doing the following? git add -p git merge
I’m saying that any number of times I start putting together a commit by staging things on Friday afternoon, come back on Monday, pull in latest from main, and continue working on forming a commit.
If I had to (manually, we’re discussing among other things the assertion that you could eliminate the stage because it’s pointless, and you could “just” commit whenever you want to stage and revert the commit whenever they want to unstage ) commit things on Friday, forget I’d done so on Monday, pull in 300 commits from main, and then whoops I want to revert a commit 301 commits back so now I get to back out the merge and etc etc, this is all just a giant pain in the ass to even type out.
Does that help clarify?
I’m honestly not interested in reading it, or in what “Jujutsu” does, as I’m really happy with git and totally uninterested in replacing it. All I was discussing in this thread with Loup-Vaillant was the usefulness of the stage as an abstraction and my disinterest in seeing it removed under an attitude of “well you could just manually make commits when you would want to stage things, instead”.
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I’m honestly not interested in reading it, or in what “Jujutsu” does
Too bad, this link you’re refusing to read is highly relevant to this thread. Here’s a teaser:
As a Git power-user, you may think that you need the power of the index to commit only part of the working copy. However, Jujutsu provides commands for more directly achieving most use cases you’re used to using Git’s index for.
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What “jujutsu” does under the hood has nothing whatsoever to do with this asinine claim of yours, which is the scenario I was objecting to: https://lobste.rs/s/yi97jn/is_it_time_look_past_git#c_k6w2ut
At this point I’ve had enough of you showing up in my inbox with these poorly informed, bad faith responses. Enough.
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I was claiming that the workflows we have with the staging area, we could achieve without. And Jujutsu here has ways to do exactly that. It has everything to do with the scenario you were objecting to.
Also, this page (and what I cited specifically) is not about what jujutsu does under the hood, it’s about its user interface.
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No offence but, why would I give a shit about [simplicity of implementation]?
It’s because people don’t give a shit that we have bloated (and often slow) software.
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Sublime Merge is the ideal git client for me. It doesn’t pretend it’s not git like all other GUI clients I’ve used so you don’t have to learn something new and you don’t unlearn git. It uses simple git commands and shows them to you. Most of git’s day-to-day problems go away if you can just see what you’re doing (including what you’ve mentioned).
CLI doesn’t cut it for projects of today’s size. A new git won’t fix that. The state of a repository doesn’t fit in a terminal and it doesn’t fit in my brain. Sublime Merge shows it just right.
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I didn’t know about GitUp but I have become a big fan of gitui as of late.
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See Game of Trees for an alternative to the git tool that interacts with normal git repositories.
Have to agree with others about the value of the staging area though! It’s the One Big Thing I missed while using Mercurial.
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Well, on the one hand people could long for a better way to store the conflict resolutions to reuse them better on future merges.
On the other hand, of all approaches to DAG-of-commits, Git’s model is plain worse than the older/parallel ones. Git is basically intended to lose valuable information about intent. The original target branch of the commit often tells as much as the commit message… but it is only available in reflog… auto-GCed and impossible to sync.
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Honestly I have completely the opposite feeling. Back in the days before git crushed the world, I used Mercurial quite a lot and I liked that Mercurial had both the ephemeral “throw away after use” model (bookmarks) and the permanent-part-of-your-repository-history model (branches). They serve different purposes, and both are useful and important to have. Git only has one and mostly likes to pretend that the other is awful and horrible and nobody should ever want it, but any long-lived project is going to end up with major refactoring or rewrites or big integrations that they’ll want to keep some kind of “here’s how we did it” record to easily point to, and that’s precisely where the heavyweight branch shines.
And apparently I wrote this same argument in more detail around 12 years ago.
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If you go further, there are many directions to extend what you can store and query in the repository! And of course they are useful. But even the data Git forces you to have (unlike, by the way, many other DVCSes where if you do not want a meaningful name you can just have multiple heads in parallel inside a branch) could be used better.
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I can’t imagine a scenario where the original branch point of a feature would ever matter, but I am constantly sifting through untidy merge histories that obscure the intent.
Tending to your commit history with intentionality communicates to reviewers what is important, and removes what isn’t.
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It is not about the point a branch started from. It is about which of the recurring branches the commit was in. Was it in quick-fix-train branch or in update-major-dependency-X branch?
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The reason why this isn’t common is because of GitHub more than Git. They don’t provide a way to use merge commits that isn’t a nightmare.
When I was release managing by hand, my preferred approach was rebasing the branch off HEAD but retaining the merge commit, so that the branch commits were visually grouped together and the branch name was retained in the history. Git can do this easily.
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I never understood the hate for Git’s CLI. You can learn 99% of what you need to know on a daily basis in a few hours. That’s not a bad time investment for a pivotal tool that you use multiple times every day. I don’t expect a daily driver tool to be intuitive, I expect it to be rock-solid, predictable, and powerful.
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This is a false dichotomy: it can be both (as Mercurial is). Moreover, while it’s true that you can learn the basics to get by with in a few hours, it causes constant low-level mental overhead to remember how different commands interact, what the flag is in this command vs. that command, etc.—and never mind that the man pages are all written for people thinking in terms of the internals, instead of for general users. (That this is a common failing of man pages does not make it any less a problem for git!)
One way of saying it: git has effectively zero progressive disclosure of complexity. That makes it a continual source of paper cuts at minimum unless you’ve managed to actually fully internalize not only a correct mental model for it but in many cases the actual implementation mechanics on which it works.
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Its manpages are worthy of a parody: https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net
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Its predecessors CVS and svn had much more intuitive commands (even if they were was clumsy to use in other ways). DARCS has been mentioned many times as being much more easy to use as well. People migrating from those tools really had a hard time, especially because git changed the meanings of some commands, like checkout.
Then there were some other tools that came up around the same time or shortly after git but didn’t get the popularity of git like hg and bzr, which were much more pleasant to use as well.
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I think the issues people have are less about the CLI itself and more about how it interfaces with the (for some developers) complex and hard to understand concepts at hand.
Take rebase for example. Once you grok what it is, it’s easy, but trying to explain the concept of replaying commits on top of others to someone used to old school tools like CVS or Subversion can be a challenge, especially when they REALLY DEEPLY don’t care and see this as an impediment to getting their work done.
I’m a former release engineer, so I see the value in the magic Git brings to the table, but it can be a harder sell for some :)
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The interface is pretty bad.
I would argue that this is one of the main reasons for git’s success. The CLI is so bad that people were motivated to look for tools to avoid using it. Some of them were motivated to write tools to avoid using it. There’s a much richer set of local GUI and web tools than I’ve seen for any other revision control system and this was true even when git was still quite new.
I never used a GUI with CVS or Subversion, but I wanted to as soon as I started touching the git command line. I wanted features like PRs and web-based code review, because I didn’t want to merge things locally. I’ve subsequently learned a lot about how to use the git CLI and tend to use it for a lot of tasks. If it had been as good as, say, Mercurial’s from the start then I never would have adopted things like
gitx/gitgand GitHub and it’s those things that make the git ecosystem a pleasant place to be. -
The interface of Git and its underlying data models are two very different things, that are best treated separately.
Yes a thousand times this! :) Git’s data model has been a quantum leap for people who need to manage source code at scale. Speaking as a former release engineer, I used to be the poor schmoe who used to have to conduct Merge Day, where a branch gets merged back to main.
There was exactly one thing you could always guarantee about merge day: There Will Be Blood.
So let’s talk about looking past git’s god awful interface, but keep the amazing nubbins intact and doing the nearly miraculous work they do so well :)
And I don’t just mean throwing a GUI on top either. Let’s rethink the platonic ideal for how developers would want their workflow to look in 2022. Focus on the common case. Let the ascetics floating on a cloud of pure intellect script their perfect custom solutions, but make life better for the “cold dark matter” developers which are legion.
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I would say that you simultaneously give credit where it is not due (there were multiple DVCSes before Git, and approximately every one had a better data model, and then there are things that Subversion still has better than everyone else, somehow), and ignore the part that actually made your life easier — the efforts of pushing Git down people’s throat, done by Linus Torvalds, spending orders of magnitude more of his time on this than on getting things right beyond basic workability in Git.
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Well, Bazaar is technically earlies. Monotone is significantly earlier. Monotone has quite interesting and nicely decoupled data model where the commit DAG is just one thing; changelog, author — and branches get the same treatment — are not parts of a commit, but separately stored claims about a commit, and this claim system is extensible and queriable. And of course Git was about Linus Torvalds speedrunning implementation of the parts of BitKeeper he really really needed.
It might be that in the old days running on Python limited speed of both Mercurial and Bazaar. Rumour has it that the Monotone version Torvalds found too slow was indeed a performance regression (they had one particularly slow release at around that time; Monotone is not in Python)
Note that one part of things making Git fast is that enables some optimisations that systems like Monotone make optional (it is quite optimistic about how quickly you can decide that the file must not have been modified, for example). Another is that it was originally only intended to be FS-safe on ext3… and then everyone forgot to care, so now it is quite likely to break the repository in case of unclean shutdown mid-operation. Yes, I have damaged repositories that way to a state where I could not find advice on how to avoid re-cloning to get even partially working repository.
As of Subversion, it has narrow checkouts which are a great feature, and DVCSes could also have them, but I don’t think anyone properly has them. You kind of can hack something with remote-automate in Monotone, but probably flakily.
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Let the data model pretend there’s a blob for each version of that huge file, even though in fact the software is automatically compressing & decompressing things under the hood.
Ironically, that’s part of the performance problem – compressing the packfiles tends to be where things hurt.
Still, this is definitely a solvable problem.
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I used to love DARCS, but I think patch theory was probably the wrong choice.
I have created and maintains official test suite for pijul, i am the happiest user ever.
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Hmm, knowing you I’m sure you’ve tested it to death.
I guess they got rid of the exponential conflict resolution that plagued DARCS? If so perhaps I should give patch theory another go. Git ended up winning the war before I got around to actually study patch theory, maybe it is sounder than I thought.
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Pijul is a completely different thing than Darcs, the current state of a repository in Pijul is actually a special instance of a CRDT, which is exactly what you want for a version control system.
Git is also a CRDT, but HEAD isn’t (unlike in Pijul), the CRDT in Git is the entire history, and that is not a very useful property.
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You can’t describe Git without discussing rebase and merge: these are the two most common operations in Git, yet they don’t satisfy any interesting mathematical property such as associativity or symmetry:
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Associativity is when you want to merge your commits one by one from a remote branch. This should intuitively be the same as merging the remote HEAD, but Git manages to make it different sometimes. When that happens, your lines can be shuffled around more or less randomly.
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Symmetry means that merging A and B is the same as merging B and A. Two coauthors doing the same conflictless merge might end up with different results. This is one of the main benefits of GitHub: merges are never done concurrently when you use a central server.
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Well, at least this is not the fault of the data model: if you have all the snapshots, you can deduce all the patches. It’s the operations themselves that need fixing.
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My point is that this is a common misconception: no datastructure is ever relevant without considering the common operations we want to run on it.
For Git repos, you can deduce all the patches indeed, but merge and rebase can’t be fixed while keeping a reasonable performance, since the merge problem Git tries to solve is the wrong one (“merge the HEADs, knowing their youngest common ancestor”). That problem cannot have enough information to satisfy basic intuitive properties.
The only way to fix it is to fetch the entire sequence of commits from the common ancestor. This is certainly doable in Git, but merges become O(n) in time complexity, where n is the size of history.
The good news is, this is possible. The price to pay is a slightly more complex datastructure, slightly harder to implement (but manageable). Obviously, the downside is that it can’t be consistent with Git, since we need more information. On the bright side, it’s been implemented: https://pijul.org
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no datastructure is ever relevant without considering the common operations we want to run on it.
Agreed. Now, how often do we actually merge stuff, and how far is the common ancestor in practice?
My understanding of the usage of version control is that merging two big branches (with an old common ancestor) is rare. Far more often we merge (or rebase) work units with just a couple commits. Even more often than that we have one commit that’s late, so we just pull in the latest change then merge or rebase that one commit. And there are the checkout operations, which in some cases can occur most frequently. While a patch model would no doubt facilitate merges, it may not be worth the cost of making other, arguably more frequent operations, slower.
(Of course, my argument is moot until we actually measure. But remember that Git won in no small part because of its performance.)
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I agree with all that, except that:
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the only proper modelling of conflicts, merges and rebases/cherry-picking I know of (Pijul) can’t rely on common ancestors only, because rebases can make some future merges more complex than a simple 3-way merge problem.
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I know many engineers are fascinated by Git’s speed, but the algorithm running on the CPU is almost never the bottleneck: the operator’s brain is usually much slower than the CPU in any modern version control system (even Darcs has fixed its exponential merge). Conflicts do happen, so do cherry-picks and rebases. They aren’t rare in large projects, and can be extremely confusing without proper tools. Making these algorithms fast is IMHO much more important from a cost perspective than gaining 10% on a operation already taking less than 0.1 second. I won’t deny the facts though: if Pijul isn’t used more in industry, it could be partly because that opinion isn’t widely shared.
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some common algorithmic operations in Git are slower than in Pijul (
pijul creditis much faster thangit blameon large instances), and most operations are comparable in speed. One thing where Git is faster is browsing old history: the datastructures are ready in Pijul, but I haven’t implemented the operations yet (I promised I would do that as soon as this is needed by a real project).
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There is apparently a Mac contender: https://shrugs.app/
Though it seems pretty crap in comparison to RC.
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Which macOS features are unavailable when using Qt?
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Genuinely sad that we’ll be losing the K9 name and logo at some point. 😅 A real part of that app’s appeal (alongside being an excellent mail client of course).
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David has since posted an update saying that having implemented Gmail OAUTH support, he then found that getting his application approved by Google would cost “$10,000 -$75,000” annually for mandatory security assessments.
Understandably, he is not able or willing to do this.
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Not related to OAuth, but today Google also managed to kill off the excellent Android email app FairEmail.
Its developer, Marcel, has given up trying to get new versions of the app through the Play Store’s approval process.
I have removed all my apps from the Play store and I will stop supporting and maintaining my apps. Google won.
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Interestingly, people on The Orange Site seem to claim that there’s a phrasing there that would make the payment (and assessments) not apply to typical desktop clients (software not working on or using other servers). Did David miss it, or are the people there missing something, or is Google just overall to vague to be sure what they mean?
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“security assessments” = Google employee clicking the “scan application” button on web UI
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NewPipe on Android. Recently I had to use YouTube on a friend’s iPhone and oh my goodness, how horrendous it is!
NewPipe is fantastic. You can even download videos for offline uses!
On the desktop, fish shell is great. The only thing I miss from bash is the “sudo !!” to repeat the previous command as root, but otherwise I love the sane defaults and all the little helpers. It’s one of the first things I setup on a fresh Linux install.
You can
alt-sto toggle sudo on your current command. If the prompt is empty it will automatically toggle sudo on your last command!+1 for NewPipe! It is stunning how good that app is compared to the official experience. Also, the developers deserve all the praise in the world for the fact that when the video extractor breaks due to YouTube changing something on their end, we reliably get a fix pushed out within days if not hours.
I agree, NewPipe provides a much better YouTube experience. I recommend the fork NewPipe x SponsorBlock x Return YouTube Dislike, which can use the crowd-sourced data returned by the SponsorBlock API to skip unwanted sections of videos such as reminders to like and subscribe.
You might notice in NewPipe x SponsorBlock’s README that the first installation method is a link “Get it on IzzyOnDroid”. If you’re not aware, IzzyOnDroid is more than just an APK host. I recommend installing the app like this, which will allow you to easily update it: