Windows, because of the size of the team and the nature of the work, often has VERY large merges across branches (10,000’s of changes with 1,000’s of conflicts). At a former startup, our product was built on Chromium. As the build/release engineer, one of my daily responsibilities was merging Chromium's changes with ours. Just performing the merge and conflict resolution was anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour of my t…
The largest Git repo
181–190 of 416 posts
Re: The largest Git repo
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The NT kernel is surprisingly small and well-factored to begin with - it is a lot closer to a 'pure' philosophy (e.g. Microkernel) than something like Linux to begin with. If you have a problem with Windows being overcomplicated or in need of refactor it is almost certainly something to do with not-the-kernel. If you look at something like the Linux kernel its actually much larger than Windows. It needs to have every…
Re: The largest Git repo
#183I have tremendous respect for Microsoft pulling itself together over the past few years.
This may be the thing that gets Google to switch. They like having every piece of code in a single repository which Git cannot handle. Now that it is somewhat proven, maybe Google will leverage GVFS on Windows and create a FUSE solution for Linux.
Re: The largest Git repo
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you name it "GVFS" instead of something more descriptive like "GitVFS"?
This was discussed a bit in the comments in Brian Harry's last post on GVFS: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/02/03/scaling-g... We're building a VFS (Virtual File System) for Git (G) so GVFS was a very natural name and it just kind of stuck once we came up with it.
Re: The largest Git repo
#185I have tremendous respect for Microsoft pulling itself together over the past few years.
This may be the thing that gets Google to switch. They like having every piece of code in a single repository which Git cannot handle. Now that it is somewhat proven, maybe Google will leverage GVFS on Windows and create a FUSE solution for Linux.
Re: The largest Git repo
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of that is probably static art assets. A lot of big corporate projects are guilty of just throwing everything in one tree like this where for some bizarre reason you are checking out jpgs and video files. It is part of the reason why the Chrome or Unreal Engine repos are preposterously large (hundreds of megs to gigabytes each).
And there was an article a few weeks back about how certain content creation tools (Adobe) stuff in lots of metadata into these assets by default. Some of the MS teams were good about stripping those out for release, others, didn't seem to notice.
Re: The largest Git repo
#187Linus must be very proud - his favourite software Windows - now depends on GIT.
Linus definitely is a rare genius on design and execution - he made his mark not only on Kernels/OSes, but on version control systems as well. I salute you, Linus!
Re: The largest Git repo
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are the big monorepo companies actually waiting for global test suite completion for every change? I'd doubt that, I'm sure they're using intelligent tools to figure out what tests to actually run. Compute for testing is massively expensive at that scale so it's an obvious place to optimize
Google's build and testing system is smart in which tests to run, as you suspect, but it still has a very, very large footprint.
Re: The largest Git repo
#189I have tremendous respect for Microsoft pulling itself together over the past few years.
I don't believe for one second this was a quick turnaround for them either. I've spoken to MS dev evangelists at work stuff over the past few years and they've continually said "it's going to get better", usually with a wry smile.
It bloody did too. They're nowhere near perfect, and the different product branches remain as disjointed as ever, but I'm genuinely impressed at the sheer scale of the organisational change they've implemented.
Re: The largest Git repo
#190I don't know much about Windows development, but I'm sure the system is modularized in some way. Why wouldn't you want to break up the project into multiple repos for different parts of the system? That would let you work on and test each part independent of the rest. Each part should be able to function on its own, right? Of course some engineers would need to build and test the entire OS as a whole, but I'd wager t…