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Git experts should try Jujutsu
(pksunkara.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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Programming
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Well, git is for source control, not binary artefacts. There are indeed projects whose size is not a good match to git, but not everyone is Google or CERN.
What are your requirements? What do you need this for? And why do you think everyone else needs the same?
It's quite possible you are doing it wrong. What you want as a FOSS project are probably libraries which are build, versioned, and packaged separately. Perhaps using Debian packaging tools or Guix. Splitting it into real libraries with a concise API ensures that the API surface does not becomes too large, that the components stay relatively compact and maintainable, and that other parts of the FOSS community can re-use that library.
Companies - especially large companies - sometimes promote vendoring instead. But this promotes their interests, not those of the FOSS community on which creations they are building on.
Yes, git is designed to match the needs of the Open Source community! If you have a deeply intertwined multi-billion code base for a commercial product, a smartphone with closed firmware, or yet another TV , it might not be the best match. But who cares? Is the open source community obliged to meet such needs?
Only because it is bad at binary artefacts. There's no fundamental reason you shouldn't be able to put them in version control.
It's not much of an argument to say "VCSes shouldn't be able to store binaries because they aren't good at it".
Typically there's a third or first party project that I want to use in my project. Sometimes I want to be able to modify it too (soft fork).
Because I've worked in at least 3 companies who want to do this. Nobody had a good solution. I've talked to colleagues that also worked in other companies that wanted this. Often they come up with their own hacky solutions (git subtree, git subrepo, Google's
repo, etc. etc. - there are at least half a dozen of these tools).No offence, but your instinctive defence of Git and your instant leap to "you're holding it wrong" are a pretty dead giveaway that you haven't stopped to think about how it could be better.
There are good solutions: Use proper package managers with automated build support like dpkg, pacman, pip or perhaps uv, or even better Guix. Companies not doing that are just cutting corners here.
That can work in some cases, but it's usually not that great for first party projects where you want to be able to see and edit the code, and most package managers are OS or language specific so they don't work well with multi-language project or projects using a language that doesn't have a good package manager (SystemVerilog for example).