https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/205125

Also I found this duplicate: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/211508

There’s probably more…

They’ve been doing that for about the last 6 releases. I wish they’d fix some of the long-standing annoying bugs like the fact that you can’t respect .gitignore and search in a subdirectory at the same time. Or the fact that you can’t stage a submodule unless you also have that submodule open.

Or how about a less annoying way to configure Run/Debug than launch.json?

Still, can’t complain. It’s mostly free and still very good overall. I’ll definitely be watching Zed… but maybe not too closely until it supports opening large files.

I used to use Git stash but I found in the end I found just making “real” commits was better.

I’ve tried this. Unfortunately it isn’t anywhere near as good as Git Graph, or at least it wasn’t when I tried it a few months ago. I’ll stick with Git Graph until it stops working I think.

I haven’t actually used this site (found it after I already learnt Git), but it gets posted a lot, and one issue I feel like it has is it shows you the Git graph using a tool that you have to immediately throw away after you’ve finished this tutorial.

I think it would be better if it had an actual real Git tool shown. I would say VSCode’s Git Graph extension would be ideal but unfortunately it has a stupid license.

Not many people back up continuously, so this is still useful.

Well yeah I think the point is you’re human and you might make a mistake.

It is slightly surprising no? I can’t see any real reason for it to record this information.

That said, your rough timezone is probably going to leak just from the fact that people generally don’t make commits in the middle of the night. If you want HN paranoia levels of anonymity you need to schedule your commits to be automatically pushed at exactly midnight UTC every day.

I’m pretty senior, having been in the industry for some time, so I tend not to be asking the questions that will have a million examples out there

Me too, but this was C++ where there isn’t a strong culture of making high quality libraries available for everything (because it doesn’t have a proper package manager, at least until very recently), so you do end up having to reinvent the wheel a fair bit.

And sometimes you just need things a bit different to what other people have done. So even though there are a gazillion expression parsers out there (so the LLM understood it pretty well) there are hardly any that support 64-bit integers. But that’s a small enough difference that it can deal with it.

It really depends on the domain. E.g. I wrote a parser and copilot was tremendously useful, presumably because there are a gazillion examples on the internet.

Another case where it saved me literally hours was spawning a subprocess in C++ and capturing stdin/out. It didn’t get it 100% right but it saved me so much time looking up how to do it and the names of functions etc.

Today I’m trying to write a custom image format, and it is pretty useless for that task, presumably because nobody else has done it before.

Well this isn’t a standard library either then. But seeing as it is literally called that I’d say your unusually restrictive definition is nonsense.

Yeah in order to access native features that Node supports and you can’t do on the web, like running processes and opening TCP connections.

Yet another? The only other one is Node’s and that is trash.

I mean… You’re probably going to run the code in the repo eventually anyway right? At least in the majority of cases. Tbh I don’t think it really changes the threat model significantly.

There are use cases like monorepos where vdm won’t work.

Erm yeah because the whole point of monorepos is that you don’t use submodules. What?

Git does track submodule history unlike vdm.

The history of submodules is tracked in the submodule repo. VDM doesn’t change that.

It uses them.

It doesn’t use them any differently to if you had just checked out the submodule standalone. I’m not exactly sure what VDM does (haven’t used it) but that doesn’t seem like a big thing.

This is not how git submodules or subtrees work.

No?. Actually that’s not all you need to manage for git submodules - there’s additional hidden state so you can’t just edit that file; you need to use git add/rm. Which is fundamentally the same but worse - this is one of the selling points of the alternatives like VDM. It’s way less confusing.

Git submodules and subtrees don’t support anything other than git remotes.

So? Alternatives to git submodules don’t need to restrict themselves to its features.

Neither does Git though. I’m not really sure I follow your point. This is clearly intended as an alternative to submodules. It says so!

I’m not saying it’s an exact copy of git submodules.

First line of the readme:

vdm is an alternative to e.g. Git Submodules for managing arbitrary external dependencies for the same reasons, in a more sane way.

It would be good to see a comparison with the many other reimplementations of submodules.

Git is all about tracking changes over time which is meaningless with binary files.

Utter codswallop. You can see the changes to a PNG over time. Lots of different UIs will even show you diffs for images.

Git can track changes to binary files perfectly well. It might not be great at dealing with conflicts in them but that’s another matter.

The only issue is that binary files tend to be large, and often don’t compress very well with Git’s delta compression. It’s large files that are the issue, not binary files. If you have a 20 kB binary file it’s going to be absolutely fine in Git. Likewise a 10 GB CSV file is not going to be such a good idea.

The main downside is Git downloads all history by default, and so any large files will bloat the download for people cloning your repo forever. It isn’t about binary vs text. It’s just the size that matters.