sasham

The issues they want to address are already solved in Diversion (https://diversion.dev). Granted it's not open source yet, but that isn't usually a priority for game/entertainment studios - having a complete platform is.

After tearing it apart for 2 hours - it seems like a solid beginning, but definitely not a fully-functioning product (especially on Mac, I hope it works better on Linux/Windows).

Disclaimer - I'm one of Diversion's founders.

Thanks for the tip! Just did, everything seems to work. Maybe Webflow had a glitch?

We're barely starting to see AI's impact on infra - probably <1% of what's coming. Repo hosting as it is today won't scale - it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, starting with basic architecture. And I don't think we should go back to self hosting and sharing patches over email...

(FWIW https://diversion.dev is at 100% uptime. Different scale, obviously, but also we're not Microsoft.)

Perforce still exists and doing well, just because Git can't handle binary files and large repos. Which is a silly limitation these days.

I'm one of the founders of https://diversion.dev. It's a version control used mainly by game developers, but also by some audio and video artists. Its advantages over git for music production - 1) it works with large binary files out of the box, and 2) it's easy to use for non-technical people. This also solves the issue of backing up and sharing the project complete with large media files that the author mentions.

I'm sorry but your argument is defeated by the reality that there was a Hudna on October 7th, and Hamas broke it with a brutal attack killing and kidnapping hundreds of civilians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_attacks)

Fixed

Ooops! We built a new site and now it's broken. Thanks for flagging! Fixing, it will be available here: http://www.diversion.dev/blog/rss.xml

Interesting! So you basically implemented something similar to git LFS, correct?

Can I ask what's your usecase and why not use LFS instead?

Thank you very much for the thoughtful comment! You're exactly right - Diversion's goal is to improve things such as what you mentioned. Moreover, we're aiming to build a flexible system that can be extended and improved further.

We'll definitely implement at least some of the things you mentioned!

Thanks for the feedback! Point taken.

The intro video is really just scratching the surface, you're right. We'll post more in-depth videos soon.

Thanks! I like GH Desktop as well, as a matter of fact our Web UI is a bit influenced by it :) The difference is that GHD is a GUI for git. It's quite good in hiding some of the complexity, but if you get a git error (like a diverged branch) you still need to troubleshoot it. Diversion is completely different. 1st of all it's far less complex, without local branches, staging area, etc. It also syncs your work in progress to the cloud in real time, alerts users about potential conflicts, handles large files without extra configuration, etc. Feel free to try it! (It's also free forever for small teams).

Exactly.

The number of companies that implemented their own merge queue is too damn high.

Sorry, currently we're only offering Diversion as SaaS. I understand that some may prefer to self-host, this might be an option in the future.

Like any validation - LOTS and LOTS user interviews. We found out that general software devs are mostly ok with git (many of them hate it, but they manage). They are interested in real-time collaboration features that we can offer, but these are not enough to become 1st users before there's a good ecosystem. Meanwhile, in game development some are desperately looking for a better VCS. This is why we're starting there.

Thanks for the feedback! Transfer is a challenge for sure. Can I ask how do you do remote work with on-prem?

The advantages are that it's much easier to set up, manage and use, and less expensive. You're right, the FAQ should reflect this better.

Done!

That's interesting!! Does the license prohibit any use of cloud to store the assets? Or private cloud is OK?

Why the worst? Microsoft is a more serious competitor to game studios with Xbox Game Studios and now Activision Blizzard. (And yet they do use Azure).

You definitely have a point reg vendor lock, we've planned for this and Diversion will be able to run in any cloud and on-prem in the future (we are running it in containers now).

Totally agree, it won't be easy. Companies do pay for GitHub/GitLab/Perforce though, and for indie devs there's the free tier. I think what made git really take off is actually GitHub's free tier/OS hosting, and not git itself being free (at least for parts of the market, and I might be wrong).

100% correct about VCS development, it's much harder than one can expect.

Totally agree, and the launch post could only be that long :) We're trying to build a better dev experience, and the tech is only a means to that end.

If most of your features are only available in a browser, I'm not going to want to use it, even if it were better than what I do now.

The CLI is the most complete interface. Web UI still can't do everything (getting there though).

Thanks for the feedback!

Just how "cloud-native" are we talking here?

So we're entirely serverless, using distributed cloud storage and DBs. Basically Diversion is up as long as you don't have a major AWS outage (happens, but rarely).

Not needing external servers for VCS is one of the things git gets right.

I agree in general. But the way most devs are using git today isn't really decentralized, everything is going into and out of GitHub/Lab. And the more often the better, because CI and merge conflicts. So I wonder if having a VCS that is decentralized in theory really important - taking into account the upsides of building in the cloud (scalability, distribution speed, collaboration etc).

I think Google Docs are doing a pretty good job there! I personally can't stand both Word and Excel so totally agree

Thanks for the support! Reminded me of https://xkcd.com/1597/

I wonder why git became such a divisive issue, nobody seemed to have such strong feelings about SVN :D

To put into perspective, that was in 2014 :D There were no branch protections, and git was even harder to use. Plus everyone was new at git, obviously (we started in 2013 with mercurial, which was still a legit thing to do, and switched to git).

Thanks for the feedback! We're offering a private cloud option for large customers, from many conversations this is OK for most of them. And adding a daily backup to any location is actually very easy.

At least with git there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of copies of any repository around the company.

This is actually a huge issue for large companies (data breach), that doesn't have a good solution with Git.

Right now we're trying to get it to users who prefer something that just works, and don't want to think about hosting. But you can actually run Diversion in a container (that looses distributed storage and DBs, which means it won't be as scalable). Other providers would definitely be great, if we succeed in standardizing it like git.

Perforce is amazingly scalable, but that comes with a price (literally and figuratively :)) We still can't handle petabyte repos like P4 does, but we'll get there. But we can handle very large and frequently changing binaries pretty well.

The Git sync feature allows one to import an existing git repo (currently GitHub is supported) into a new Diversion repo, and keep both in sync: every commit into Git is imported into Diversion and vice versa.

This allows a member of a team that works with Git to try Diversion, to keep backups, and to use GitHub Actions or other CI tools that work with git.