Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

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Git (VCS in general) seems like this absurd accidental secret of our profession.

I use Fusion360 occasionally for hobby stuff, and its version 'control' is a joke, it's unfathomable to me how (especially since they're fellow engineers, technical people!) people can use and collaborate with it to build serious stuff.

I think there's a lot of money to be made and a potential huge turning point in end user software for figuring out 'git for non-technical users'. People will argue it's not even good for SEs (I happen to like it) UI sucks etc. but that's not the point, it's fine, GUIs exist, that'd be an easy problem if everything was stored in plaintext. The key will be in figuring out how you make it attractive to people building software for such users, that they want to use your VCS mechanism, that it's easy to do so and doesn't require plaintext diff-sane on disk format (if they wanted/were willing to do that they would already and git would be fine).

Perhaps some kind of CRDT (or similar) based collaboration/storage/version control service, with APIs such that you can have whatever proprietary format you want on top of it, but under the hood it handles sync, multi-user, merges, reversions, rebases, cherry-picks, diffs, etc.

Attorneys don’t use Git, but they do use version control software. Examples are NetDocs, iManage, and even GDrive/Box/Dropbox (which are also document management systems). It largely depends on the firm.

There are some differences between what they need and what software engineers need.

Lawyers will sometimes use version control as layers in a release system, almost like development/staging/production (where production is the final executed copy). So version 1 will be the form, and version 2 will be the draft, etc.

Other times they will use it in a similar manner to engineers. But the top version is the working copy, and once they are satisfied with that draft they will version up.

Engineers use git to track changes and revert changes, but attorneys do not typically need to revert and once a document is executed, prior drafts aren’t really that important.

So there are fundamental differences between how lawyers and engineers look at version control.

It would be pretty nifty if attorneys/clients could collaborate using a version control system, but it’s hard enough to get attorneys to try any tool let alone a group of attorneys, so it would be a real stroke of luck to wedge yourself in here successfully.

Background: made a document management system for a law firm.

> attorneys do not typically need to revert and once a document is executed, prior drafts aren’t really that important.

this isn't 100% true. lawyers very much care about changes in legal codes over time. its incredibly time consuming to do historical legal research given how legal code changes are recorded. strike paragraph 5, insert 'foo' in section 5.3.1. etc.

There's a plethora of opportunity for version control for almost every other domain. The technology is already there. The key to winning the market is in process change and sales/distribution.

If your product would be made better by version control, Fossil works really well as a white label VCS mechanism. It is BSD licensed, and the repository is just a sqlite db. While it has basic UI, ticketing, and collaboration tools no one says you have to use it. I have seen it used where a fully custom UI with proprietary diff tools was provided instead of the default setup.

i've used fusion 360 professionally and version control was terrible, and i bet it still is. it was a huge pain using it on a professional project although it holds a lot of promise. the teams working on it were just cranking out more bullshit features like ipad support and 3d printing instead of fixing key issues like version control, part reuse workflows, constraints causing crashes, and general performance issues with large (realistic) product assemblies.

subversion with turtoiseSVN worked well for me and was perfect in that it was version control for newbies. until I was forced to use git because it was the hot new thing. no real reason for me to use git, but there you go.

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