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rmbyrro · 3 years ago
If the rest of the world were like the software industry, we would see news like this on Facebook:

"KayaCar, a distributed kayak with wheels to drive on the streets of San Francisco"

sophacles · 3 years ago
I would consider using facebook if there were articles like that. Not sure why you consider this a problem... "Because I can" is a good enough reason to do anything that doesn't cause harm to others.
remram · 3 years ago
I think if someone made a KayakCar, we would still hear about it on HN not Facebook.
rmbyrro · 3 years ago
I did not make any judgement, just noting that this mindset is quite peculiar to the software industry.

Might be because of my ignorance of other areas of human activity, though...

chrsig · 3 years ago
> "Because I can" is a good enough reason to do anything that doesn't cause harm to others.

It's hard to tell in advance how any action may impact others. The extreme example: jumping off a bridge doesn't physically harm others. But having to look at, examine, or otherwise interact with your corpse may inflict trauma on others.

elpakal · 3 years ago
I'm not on Facebook but from what I hear this is an article you are likely to find on there.
cultofmetatron · 3 years ago
mwexler · 3 years ago
Using git for so many things (it's a database! it's a blockchain! it's a dessert topping! It's a floor wax! [1]) does start to smell of "I have a hammer, and luckily everything looks like a nail if I squint enough". But it is fun to see how folks have stretched git into so many directions, even if some of them are more useful than others.

[1] SNL, 1976: https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/shimmer-floor-... (may not work in all regions, sorry)

(edited link)

danielvaughn · 3 years ago
I don't see it that way - version control in general turns out to be highly applicable in many areas far beyond source code. I think it's still under-utilized.
partdavid · 3 years ago
Yes, it's extremely common to see applications which need a datastore to end up needing lots of version control type features later on, which end up implemented ad-hoc over a general database.
pknopf · 3 years ago
Medical industry, design history files, etc.
qbasic_forever · 3 years ago
Git is an abstraction over file trees (or even more generally just chunks of data), and it turns out a ton of problems in software are easily modeled and dealt with as files in a tree.
bastawhiz · 3 years ago
Lots of problems in software are easily modeled as ordered lists, but that doesn't mean linked lists are the right tool for accomplishing that.
dgllghr · 3 years ago
Looks very cool! Reminds me of Irmin (https://irmin.org/) but with a much simpler and more intuitive interface
anentropic · 3 years ago
I had same thought!

I dislike Go, but I bet gitdb is easier to use

uniqueuid · 3 years ago
Very cool. Now we need exactly this but for sqlite. Decentral offline databases that can sync.
phlyingpenguin · 3 years ago
It doesn't appear to be doing much more than replication though. https://litestream.io does that for sqlite already. (Edit for clarity) GitDB seem to have more "distributed" ideas in their roadmap for v3 maybe.
uniqueuid · 3 years ago
Litestream is awesome, but I don't see that it enables multi-way merges yet. Am I wrong?
lifty · 3 years ago
Curious how this compares to Dolt or Noms.
hiccuphippo · 3 years ago
I guess this would allow git to have its own issue tracker and forum like fossil does?
qbasic_forever · 3 years ago
You can already store and sync issues in git repo metadata, check out git-bug: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug
layer8 · 3 years ago
I believe one can say that it’s actual Git data, not just metadata.
tzahifadida · 3 years ago
Really don't get it and would like to understand. Let's say I don't need a full DB. Why use it instead of, let's say, sqlite? I know devops uses git itself for storing and pulling out stuff for their automations. Is it in that direction?
qbasic_forever · 3 years ago
Putting a sqlite db in a git repo doesn't work well, it's just an opaque blob to git so you can't merge changes beyond "wipe out every other change and accept this as the new complete state of the world".
beagle3 · 3 years ago
Disconnected remote work.

Git pull to receive updates, Git push to send your updates. No idea how/if it handles merge conflicts.

Also - you could have db “branches”.

encryptluks2 · 3 years ago
I've been imagining a similar concept, but using linting rules to create an optimized file tree with a SQL API to manipulate and query the data programmatically. You could even use a traditional text editor to manage the data.