Hacker News Reader

Comment by midas007 | Hacker News Reader

Git absolutely fails at the claim of being good for remote developers on slow links. If the network drops during such an op, feel free to enjoy starting from scratch.

View on HN

What "op" exactly? git push/pull? git push/pull are bandwidth efficient and atomic. A failed pull/push wont destroy your local/remote copy.

It tends to drop your connection on large packs.

Thats more a server configuration thing, many git hosts disconnect slow clients.

I was in Botswana for a few weeks in November and I can relate to that sentiment: git was unusable down there.

Yuck, BTDTBTTS. Satellite latency is eye-stabbing, almost as bad as the utterly worthless Mountain View's Google Wi-Fi. Local internet elsewhere, in random countries, GFL... bring your own or start a service (yeah, a friend made some serious cash putting up a service on some Greek island).

Anyone on OSX can feel some pain just by enabling Network Link Conditioner prefpane by creating a profile as follows:

  Download Bandwidth: 256 Kbps
  Downlink Packets Dropped: 90%
  Downlink Delay: 1000 ms

  Uplink Bandwidth: 256 Kbps
  Uplink Packets Dropped: 90%
  Uplink Delay: 1000 ms

  DNS Delay: 2000 ms

Setup instructions:

http://mattgemmell.com/network-link-conditioner-in-lion/

The issue is never being able to complete the fetch or push because of a spotty network.

It goes without saying that source control should not screw up my local or remote copies.

Given that 90% of operations don't touch the network at all, I'm not sure how that counts as absolute fail. With the exception of doing an initial clone on a connection that's so slow and unreliable that "clone --depth 1" doesn't work, I can't think how git would stop a remote developer from working, only how it would help them...

I tend to get around large network operations on slow connections by rsyncing the repository from the remote mirror, doing a git clone of the now local mirror with no hard links to a local version, and finally setting the remote origin of the local version to the original remote mirror.

I agree that these sorts of mental acrobatics would be unnecessary if git had proper resume support, but for me at least it's not a total showstopper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com