Git's biggest flaw is that it doesn't scale. If a new system can fix that without sacrificing any of Git's benefits, I think it can topple Git.

It's ironic that Git was popularized in the same era as monorepos, yet Git is a poor fit for monorepos. There have been some attempts to work around this. Google's `repo` command is a wrapper around Git that treats a set of smaller repos like one big one, but it's a (very) leaky abstraction. Microsoft's GVFS is a promising attempt to truly scale Git to giant repos, but it's developed as an addon rather than a core part of Git, and so far it only works on Windows (with macOS support in development). GVFS arguably has the potential to become an ubiquitous part of the Git experience, someday... but it probably won't.

Git also has trouble with large files. The situation is better these days, as most people have seemingly standardized on git-lfs (over its older competitor git-annex), and it works pretty well. Nevertheless, it feels like a hack that "large" files have to be managed using a completely different system from normal files, one which (again) is not a core part of Git.

There exist version control systems that do scale well to large repos and large files, but all the ones I've heard of have other disadvantages compared to Git. For example, they're not decentralized, or they're not as lightning-fast as Git is in smaller repos, or they're harder to use. That's why I think there's room for a future competitor!

(Fossil is not that competitor. From what I've heard, it neither scales well nor matches Git in performance for small repos, unfortunately.)

I disagree that Git's biggest flaw is its lack of scalability. Cases where git needs to scale tend to be isolated to companies that have the manpower to build a finely-tuned replacement (see: MS, Google).

Git's flaws are primarily in usability/UX. But I think for its purpose, functionality is far more important than a perfect UX. I'm perfectly happy knowing I might have to Google how to do something in Git as long as I can feel confident that Git will have the power to do whatever it is I'm trying to do. A competitor would need to do what git does as well as git does it, with a UX that is not just marginally better but categorically better, to unseat git. (Marginally better isn't strong enough to overcome incumbent use cases)

And for the record: I think git-lfs issues are primarily usability issues, and tech improvements. The tech enhancements will be solved if there's enough desire, and as I mentioned the usability problems are more annoyances than actual problems.

> Cases where git needs to scale tend to be isolated to companies that have the manpower to build a finely-tuned replacement (see: MS, Google).

I constantly run into git scalability issues as an individual. I don't use any of the UI clients because they all fail hard on mostly-code git repositories. I abandoned my VisualRust port in part because the mere 100MB of mingw binaries involved for that meant it was using github LFS, which meant CI was hitting github quota limits, and as I wasn't part of the organization - nevermind an admin with billing rights - I couldn't even pay to up said quota limits paying out of pocket myself even if I wanted to.

I'm not going to inflict git's command line experience - which confounds and confuses even seasoned programmers - on any of the less technical artists that might be employed at a typical gamedev shop, even if git might be able to scale acceptably if locally self-hosted at a single-digit employee shop.

A few dozen or hundred employees? Forget it. Use perforce, even though it costs $$$, is far from perfect, and also has plenty of scaling issues eventually.

The fact that you had a problem with github quotas isn’t really a problem with git though, is it?

The whole reason git lfs exists is to workaround git scalability problems. Its raison d'etre is problems with git.

That one of - if not the - most popular tool to solve said git scalability problems, also has scalability problems in practice, is both ironic - and absolutely a problem with the git ecosystem. To be pithy - "Even the workarounds don't work."

"Technically", you might say, "that specific symptom with git lfs, and that service provider, isn't the fault of git the command line tool, nor the git protocol". And you would be technically correct - which is the best kind of correct.

But I don't think we're referring to either of those particularly specific things with "Git" when we ask the article's question of "Is Git Irreplacable?". I'm already the weirdo for using git the command line tool - most of my peers use alternative git UI clients, and I don't mean gitk. The git protocol is routinely eschewed in favor of zips or tarballs over HTTPS, Dropbox, Sneakernet, you name it - and is invisible enough to not be worth complaining about to pretty much every developer who isn't actively working on the backend of a git client or server. Not to mention it's been extended/replaced with incremental improvements over the years already.

So I'm using a slightly broader definition of "git", inclusive of the wider ecosystem, that allows me to credit it for the alternative UI clients that do exist, rather than laughing off the question at face value - as something that has already been replaced.

Nothing about your problems had anything to do with git & everything to do with the commercial service you were using for your source code hosting.

Github the company is not interested in providing you (or anyone else) with free storage for arbitrary data. You were unable to pay for the storage options they do provide because you did not have admin rights to the github account you wanted to work with.

None of this is a problem with git, be it GUI git clients or command line ones.

This isn’t just "technically correct". It’s the "a commercial company doesn’t have to provide you with a service if they don’t want to" kind of correct.

All the commercial service providers recommend keeping total repository sizes <1GB or so, and I hear nothing but performance complaints and how much they miss perforce from those who foolishly exceed those limits, even when self hosting on solid hardware - which is 100% the fault, or at least limitation, of git - I believe you'll agree.

LFS is a suggested alternative by several commercial service providers, not just one, and seems to be one of the least horrible options with git. You're certainly not suggesting any better alternatives, and I really wish you would, because I would love for them to exist. This results in a second auth system on top of my regular git credentials, recentralization that defeats most of the point of using a DVCS in the first place, and requires a second set of parallel commands to learn, use, and remember. I got tired enough of explaining to others why you have a broken checkout when you clone an LFS repository before installing the LFS extension, that I wrote a FAQ entry somewhere that I could link people. If you don't think these are problems with "git", we must simply agree to disagree, for there will be no reconciling of viewpoints.

When I first hit the quota limits, I tried to setup caching. Failing that, I tried setting up a second LFS server and having CI pull blobs from that first when pulling simple incremental commits not touching said blobs. Details escape me this long after the fact - I might've tried to redirect LFS queries to gitlab? After a couple hours of failing to get anywhere with either despite combing through the docs and trying things that looked like they should've worked, then I tried to pay github more money - on top of my existing monthly subscription - as an ugly business-level kludge to solve a technical issue of using more bandwidth than should really have been necessary. When that too failed... now you want to pin the whole problem on github? I must disagree. We can't pin it on the CI provider either - I had trouble convincing git to use an alternative LFS server for globs when fetching upstream, even when testing locally.

I've tried gitlab. I've got a bitbucket account and plenty of tales of people trying to scale git on that. I've even got some Microsoft hosted git repositories somewhere. None of them magically scale well. In fact, so far in my experience, github has scaled the least poorly.

> Github the company is not interested in providing you (or anyone else) with free storage for arbitrary data.

I pay github, and tried to pay github more, and still had trouble. Dispense with this "free storage" strawman.

> You were unable to pay for the storage options they do provide because you did not have admin rights to the github account you wanted to work with.

To be clear - I was also unable to pay to increase LFS storage on my fork, because they still counted against the original repository. Is this specific workaround for a workaround for a workaround failing, github's fault? Yes. When git and git lfs both failed to solve the problem, github also failed to solve the problem. Don't overgeneralize the one ancedote of a failed github-specific solution, from a whole list of git problems, to being the whole problem and answer and it all being github's fault.

> None of this is a problem with git, be it GUI git clients or command line ones.

My git gui complaints are a separate issue, which I apparently shouldn't merely summarize for this discussion.

Clone https://github.com/rust-lang/rust and run your git GUI client of choice on it. git and gitk (ugly, buggy, and featureless though it may be) handle it OK. Source Tree hangs/pauses frequently enough I uninstalled, but not so frequently as to be completely unusable. I think I tried a half dozen other git UI clients, and they all repeatedly hung or showed progress bars for minutes at a time, without ever settling down, when doing basic local use involving local branches and local commits - not interacting with a remote. Presumably due to insufficient lazy evaluation or insufficient caching. And these problems were not unique to that repository either, and occured on decent machines with an SSD for the git UI install and the clone. These performance problems are 100% on those git gui clients. Right?

> This isn’t just "technically correct".

Then please share how to simply scale git in practice. Answers that include spending money are welcome. I haven't figured it out, and neither has anyone I know. You can awkwardly half-ass it by making a mess with git lfs. Or git annex. Or maybe the third party git lfs dropbox or git bittorrent stuff, if you're willing to install more unverified unreviewed never upstreamed random executables off the internet to maybe solve your problems. I remember using bittorrent over a decade ago for gigs/day of bandwidth, back when I had much less of it to spare.

> It’s the "a commercial company doesn’t have to provide you with a service if they don’t want to" kind of correct.

If it were one company not providing a specific commercial offering to solve a problem you'd have a point. No companies offering to solve my problem for git to my satisfaction, despite a few offering it for perforce, is what I'd call a git ecosystem problem.