[squeak-dev] Small commits are [bad|good] (was: The Trunk: EToys-mt.368.mcz)

Tobias Pape Das.Linux at gmx.de
Fri Nov 22 12:49:49 UTC 2019


> On 22.11.2019, at 13:44, Jakob Reschke <forums.jakob at resfarm.de> wrote:
> 
> Indeed, Git has its scalability problems as well. That's why Microsoft is developing "VFS for Git"  https://vfsforgit.org/ to address these issues, so they can use it for the massive Windows code base without being blocked by Git. Compared to that code base and its number of concurrent developers, Squeak and its ancestry are tiny, there should be no problems at all. And yet we argue regularly about saving space and time by folding a few Monticello versions together.
> 
> While the "laws of software physics" do apply to Git as well, Git still performs much better under their constraints than Monticello. I think people like to call that "more efficient". Monticello's abstract design may be nice, but its current approach to storage (which should be an implementation detail) is not. To make things worse, independent from Monticello, "how to store Smalltalk code in a file system" is another efficiency discussion as we can see in the opinions about the Tonel format.
> 
> Git never stores two equal objects twice (in a single repository, of course). Monticello does so happily with 90%+ of the snapshot and ancestry every time you press Save.
> 
> This technical shortcoming should be addressed. But it should not drive us to abandon sane diffs, which means separate commits for separate objectives.

What he says.
	-t


More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list