Version control 2016

Version control is a surprisingly hard problem, even for smart people who know git like the back of their favorite anime pillow. According to an article on trunk-based development, Google’s first engineer, Craig Silverstein, says that version control “is a surprisingly hard problem.” I do not know if Craig owns any anime pillows.

Hard problems deserve lots of solutions. For instance, there are lots of ways to make you feel better when you suffer from the common cold, which is clearly a hard problem and is obviously not yet solved. The common cold isn’t cured, and neither is the problem underlying our version control woes. Until we no longer write code, we will keep having to use remedies to make us feel better while writing code.

Enter “Version control 2016,” a new tool to make you feel less miserable. It tracks your bugs, basically merges code for you, and even recycles your scrap metal for profit. Here’s the short list of features:

• easily keeps your branch up-to-date with master/trunk
• branch-level permissions obviate forking
• tracks issues as part of the revision history
• it’s written in node.js and is super hackable (and FutureProof™)

The only downside is that it isn’t written yet, so you can’t use it. However, you are more than welcome to start evaluating it. So go ahead and bring it up in your next strategic architecture retooling meeting, right after you talk about whether to use webpack or npm scripts (do those even do the same thing?).

But I am working on it. Contributions welcome at https://github.com/pbrandt1/aluminum. For the record I think aluminum is a stupid name and is likely to change.