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The largest Git repo

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Re: The largest Git repo

#211

Post by cubano »

Isn't this perhaps the greatest validation of Linus's design genius that what was initially a weekend project[0] has successfully scaled to this?

They could no longer use their revision control system BitKeeper and no other Source Control Management (SCMs) met their needs for a distributed system. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, took the challenge into his own hands and disappeared over the weekend to emerge the following week with Git.

[0] https://www.linux.com/blog/10-years-git-interview-git-creato...

Re: The largest Git repo

#212

Post by colechristensen »

Goronmon wrote: post #153
erikpukinskis wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Becomes hard to make cross-cutting changes This does seem like a negative, doesn't it? But it's not. Making it hard to make cross-cutting changes is exactly the point of splitting up a repo. It forces you to slow down, and—knowing that you can only rarely make cross-cutting changes—you have a strong incentive to move module boundaries to where they should be. It puts pressure on you to really, actually separate c…

No, it should be hard to make arbitrary changes. If you change the word "arbitrary" to "necessary" (implying a different bias than the one you went with) then all of a sudden this attitude sounds less helpful. Similarly "easy to limp along with a bad architecture" could be re-written as "easy to work with the existing architecture". At the end of the day, it's about getting work done, not making decisions that are th…

You have to balance getting work done vs. purity, and Microsoft has spent years trying to fix a bad balance.

Windows ME/Vista/8 were terrible and widely hated pieces of software because of "getting things done" instead of making good decisions. They made billions of dollars doing it, don't get me wrong, but they've also lost a lot of market share too and have been piling on bad sentiment for years. They've been pivoting and it has nothing to do with "getting work done" but by going back and making better decisions.

Re: The largest Git repo

#213

Post by johnfn »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #126
vtbassmatt wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> - Becomes hard to make cross-cutting changes This does seem like a negative, doesn't it? But it's not. Making it hard to make cross-cutting changes is exactly the point of splitting up a repo. It forces you to slow down, and—knowing that you can only rarely make cross-cutting changes—you have a strong incentive to move module boundaries to where they should be. It puts pressure on you to really, actually separate c…

Have you actually worked on a repository at Windows scale..? If not, how can you know that your guesses about the workflow are accurate?

Re: The largest Git repo

#214

Post by trueSlav »

manyoso wrote: post #199
garyclarke27 wrote: post #45

Linus must be very proud - his favourite software Windows - now depends on GIT.

I am very certain that Linus would read this article and curse the jaw dropping stupidity of the whole endeavor. They've basically taken a tool he wrote to do real distributed source control that can scale and turned it into a central server. Git was never meant to be used this way and I know he'd be horrified+amused in the extreme.

> that can scale

Did we read the same article?

Re: The largest Git repo

#215

Post by quotemstr »

hinkley wrote: post #210
daxfohl wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather see google open up their monorepo as a platform, and compete with github. git is fine, but there's something compelling about a monorepo. Whether they do it one-monorepo-per-account, or one-global-monorepo, or some mix of the two, would be interesting to see how it shapes up.

This is the main thing I miss about subversion. You could check out any arbitrary subdirectory of a repository. On two projects the leads and full stack people had the whole thing checked out, everybody else just had the one submodule they were responsible for. Worked fairly well.

Mercurial has narrowspecs these days too! Facebook's monorepo lets you check out parts of the overall tree too. It's not like every Android engineer's laptop has all of fbios in it.

Re: The largest Git repo

#216

Post by Sharlin »

cubano wrote: post #211

Isn't this perhaps the greatest validation of Linus's design genius that what was initially a weekend project[0] has successfully scaled to this? They could no longer use their revision control system BitKeeper and no other Source Control Management (SCMs) met their needs for a distributed system. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, took the challenge into his own hands and disappeared over the weekend to emerge th…

And Linux was a hobby project as well... now it runs most of the internet AND most of the personal computing devices on the planet.

Re: The largest Git repo

#217

Post by ysleepy »

vtbassmatt wrote: post #154
bokchoi wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why only 5 months? Will more of the history be added to the git repository eventually?

No, we'll keep the SD servers around for a while for servicing older products. We also have a "breadcrumbing" system that lets an engineer follow a file's history back from Git to the old system.

Was importing the complete history tried during the development? This is very interesting. The git history will grow at break-neck speed and will reach similar size soon enough. Is this to delay the inevitable tech wrangling for dealing with terabyte histories or were there issues with the import/sync?

Or maybe it was just the initial repo setup used for alpha testing that got promoted to production :)

Re: The largest Git repo

#218

Post by aanm1988 »

js2 wrote: post #145

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…

It's not nearly as bad when you have all the people who work on it with you.

You look at who caused conflicts and send out emails. Don't land the merge until all commits are resolved. People who don't resolve their changes get in trouble.

Not perfect, but there it is.

I worked on a chromium based product as well and had the exact same problem. Eventually we came up with a reasonable system for landing commits and just tried out best to build using chromium, but not having actual patches. Worked okay, not great. Better thant he old system of having people do it manually/just porting our changes to each release.

Re: The largest Git repo

#219

Post by flamedoge »

sangnoir wrote: post #187
garyclarke27 wrote: post #45

Linus must be very proud - his favourite software Windows - now depends on GIT.

Linus ought to be proud - it wasn't too long ago when Microsoft was calling his other work "a cancer", and now Windows depends on Git.Younger me would not believe this. 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!

it is cancer with good connotations
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