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The largest Git repo

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Re: The largest Git repo

#91

Post by ATsch »

saeednoursalehi wrote: post #26
kingbirdy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions relying on a windows filesystem driver. Two questions about that: 1) Why include it in default windows? It seems that 99.99% of users would never even know it existed, let alone use it 2) Does that mean GVFS isn't useable on *nix systems? Any plans to make it useable, if so?

1) The file system driver is called GvFlt. If it does get included in Windows by default, it'll be to make it easier for products like GVFS, but GvFlt on its own is not usable by end users directly. 2) GVFS is currently only available on Windows, but we are very interested in porting to other platforms.

What are your thoughts on implementing something more general like linux's FUSE[1] instead? A general Virtual Filesystem driver in Windows could be used for a wide range of things and means you don't just have a single-purpose driver sitting around.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace

Re: The largest Git repo

#92

Post by smilekzs »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #5

I wonder why Windows is a single repository - Why not split it in separate modules? I can imagine tools like Explorer, Internet Explorer/Edge, Notepad, Wordpad, Paint, etc. all can stay in its own repository. I can imagine you can even further split things up, like a kernel, a group of standard drivers, etc. If that is not already the case (separate repos, that is), are the plans to separate it in the future?

> Before the move to Git, in Source Depot, it was spread across 40+ depots and we had a tool to manage operations that spanned them.

Re: The largest Git repo

#93

Post by vtbassmatt »

asdfgadsfgasfdg wrote: post #80
mschuster91 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you prevent data exfiltration? I mean, in theory you could restrict the visibility of repos to the user based on team membership/roles and so prevent a single person from unauditably exfiltrating the whole Windows source code tree. In contrast with a monorepo there likely won't be any alerts triggered if someone does do a full git clone, except for someone saturating his switch port...

What would someone do with the source code for Windows? No one in open source would want to touch it. No large company would want to touch it. Grey/black hats are probably happier with their decompilers. Surely it would be easier to pirate than build (assuming their build system scales with most build systems I've observed in the wild). No small company would want to touch it. Anyway MS share source with various thir…

This is all correct. Also, we'd notice someone grabbing the whole 300GB whether it's in 40 SD depots or a single Git repo.

Re: The largest Git repo

#94

Post by jonathanpoulter »

howinator wrote: post #14
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #5

I wonder why Windows is a single repository - Why not split it in separate modules? I can imagine tools like Explorer, Internet Explorer/Edge, Notepad, Wordpad, Paint, etc. all can stay in its own repository. I can imagine you can even further split things up, like a kernel, a group of standard drivers, etc. If that is not already the case (separate repos, that is), are the plans to separate it in the future?

So, this is actually pretty common. I know that both Google and Facebook use a huge mono-repo for literally everything (except I think Facebook split out their Android code into a separate repo?). So, all of Facebook's and Google's code for front-end, back-end, tools, infrastructure, literally everything, lives in one repo. It's news to me that Windows decided to go that route too. Personally, I think submodules and…

How does a mono-repo company manage open sourcing a single part of their infrastructure if things are in one large repo? For example, if everything lived in one repo, how does Facebook manage open sourcing React? Or if I personally wanted to switch to one private mono-repo, how would I share individual projects easily?

Re: The largest Git repo

#98

Post by MikusR »

vtbassmatt wrote: post #15
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, a couple of questions: 1. How do you measure "largeness" of a git repo? 2. How are you confident that you have the largest? 3. How much technical debt does that translate to?

1. Saeed is writing a really nice series of articles starting here: https://www.visualstudio.com/learn/git-at-scale/ In the first one, he lays out how we think about small/medium/large repos. Summary: size at tip, size of history, file count at tip, number of refs, and number of developers. 2. Fairly confident, at least as far as usable repos go. Given how unusable the Windows repo is without GVFS and the other thing…

Is it possible to checkout (if not build) something like Windows 3.11 or NT 4?

Re: The largest Git repo

#99

Post by cosinetau »

vtbassmatt wrote: post #25
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #5

I wonder why Windows is a single repository - Why not split it in separate modules? I can imagine tools like Explorer, Internet Explorer/Edge, Notepad, Wordpad, Paint, etc. all can stay in its own repository. I can imagine you can even further split things up, like a kernel, a group of standard drivers, etc. If that is not already the case (separate repos, that is), are the plans to separate it in the future?

Really good question. Actually, splitting Windows up was the first approach we investigated. Full details here: https://www.visualstudio.com/learn/gvfs-design-history/ Summary: - Complicates daily life for every engineer - Becomes hard to make cross-cutting changes - Complicates releasing the product - There's a still a core of "stuff" that's not easy to tease apart, so at least one of the smaller Windows repos would…

This was a very interesting point. It sounds like there are some serious architectural limitations on Windows, and this makes me believe the same might be true for the NT kernel, and that MS might not be interested in doing heavy refactoring of it.

I'm not a frequent Windows user, or a Windows dev at all. Does anyone know of any consequences that MS's decision might mean, if this hypothesis is true?

Re: The largest Git repo

#100

Post by Blackthorn »

jonathanpoulter wrote: post #94
howinator wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, this is actually pretty common. I know that both Google and Facebook use a huge mono-repo for literally everything (except I think Facebook split out their Android code into a separate repo?). So, all of Facebook's and Google's code for front-end, back-end, tools, infrastructure, literally everything, lives in one repo. It's news to me that Windows decided to go that route too. Personally, I think submodules and…

How does a mono-repo company manage open sourcing a single part of their infrastructure if things are in one large repo? For example, if everything lived in one repo, how does Facebook manage open sourcing React? Or if I personally wanted to switch to one private mono-repo, how would I share individual projects easily?

With difficulty.

No, seriously, that's the answer.

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