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Comment by thrwyoilarticle | Hacker News Reader

Then you'd need centralised protections to decide who can delete and you instantly lose the distributed features.

If I'm a user and I want to save, I do it with my text editor. If I want to share, I can do it with Github, Gerrit, Gitlab, email, pigeon.

I never email people things I didn't mean to and, if I did, I wouldn't expect my email software to let me delete it. The centralised services allow it to some degree but even they don't allow information to be un-disseminated.

VCS is necessary to deal with changes that overlap and conflict. It's not for backup and it's not a method of communication. If all you need to do is save and share, you don't need VCS.

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Github already has centralised protections to do with who can and cannot do various things, and so do other similar systems like gitlab.

So nothing is really gained but not allowing this, but it makes git very user-hostile because mistakes cannot easily be undone.

Github isn't git

That doesn't matter, the way people actually use git is that almost all repositories have someone or some small group who rule them, so nothing is really lost by having an easy option to purge things from history. And an inconvenient option (possibly more than one!) does exist.

It matters a lot, because the use cases you've seen aren't the only ones that exist. In a tool so widespread as git, that is really not surprising.

By removing it's decentralised nature you've fundamentally built a different VCS. Perhaps SVN is acceptable for your use case, that's great! It's definitely not git though - basic expected use cases were lost as predicted at the start of this thread.

Any system will get dragged down by the need to support all sorts of legacy use-cases. I think there's an xkcd cartoon about this?

The core task of a VCS is versioning and collaborating on text of some kind. Git doesn't do this in an optimal way, so eventually it will get replaced by something better. In the meantime we'll all get on with learning its ins and outs, just like previous generations learned how to use punchcards.

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