Mounting Git commits as folders with NFS
1–10 of 95 posts
Re: Mounting Git commits as folders with NFS
#2Very nice! I really like the design choices here. Though I (edit: am biased and) would personally have used Rust and https://github.com/xetdata/nfsserve.
Re: Mounting Git commits as folders with NFS
#3Very nice! I really like the design choices here. Though I (edit: am biased and) would personally have used Rust and https://github.com/xetdata/nfsserve .
I've built something like this as well, but in FUSE for Linux, not via NFS.
It really brings home how close git's design already is to being a file system.
Re: Mounting Git commits as folders with NFS
#4Reminds me of Rational ClearCase, which probably inspired the idea. You could specify a "view" using tags, and it'd present it as a filesystem to remote machines.
I think IBM now own them.
Re: Mounting Git commits as folders with NFS
#5> Git repositories sometimes have submodules. I don’t understand anything about submodules so right now I’m just ignoring them.
Submodules are interesting, because they’re next to unusable from a user perspective (they’re a pain to maintain and interact with unless you never ever update them) but they’re ridiculously simple technically which I assume is what made them attractive.
A submodule is an entry in “.gitmodules” mapping a path to a repository URL (and branch), then at the specified path in the repository is a tree entry of mode 160000 (S_IFDIR + S_IFLNK), whose oid is the commit to check out (in the submodule-linked repository).
Re: Mounting Git commits as folders with NFS
#6For those who resonate with "why might this be useful", here are "plain git" alternatives to this tool:
> searching for a function I deleted
git log -G someFunc
I use `git worktree` to "mount" long-running branches much to the same effect as Julias tool. To quickly look at a file from a non-mounted branch/commit, I use:
git show $REF:$FILENAME
git log --all -G someFunc
Re: Mounting Git commits as folders with NFS
#7For those who resonate with "why might this be useful", here are "plain git" alternatives to this tool: > searching for a function I deleted git log -G someFunc > quickly looking at a file on another branch to copy a line from it I use `git worktree` to "mount" long-running branches much to the same effect as Julias tool. To quickly look at a file from a non-mounted branch/commit, I use: git show $REF:$FILENAME > sea…
Extremely handy, saving these. Thank you.
Re: Mounting Git commits as folders with NFS
#8Git already has a similar feature. It's called worktree https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
For example: `git worktree add ` checks out that commit in that folder.
Re: Mounting Git commits as folders with NFS
#9> Git repositories sometimes have submodules. I don’t understand anything about submodules so right now I’m just ignoring them. Submodules are interesting, because they’re next to unusable from a user perspective (they’re a pain to maintain and interact with unless you never ever update them) but they’re ridiculously simple technically which I assume is what made them attractive. A submodule is an entry in “.gitmodul…
To add to this, Submodules are a hack on Git's data model.
Git's data model, put simply, is this:
* Branches are pointers to Commit objects
* Commit objects are a composite of {Commit_Comment, Tree, Parent Commit(s)}, referenced by the hash of that set
* a Tree (like a directory) is a list of Blobs and/or Trees (associating filenames with them) referenced by the hash of its contents.
* a Blob is a file, referenced by the hash of its contents.
So the set of types of objects in Git are: Commits, Trees, and Blobs.
Note that I said that a Tree can contain other Trees or Blobs... but what if... you put a Commit in it!?
That's a submodule!
Now if the Commit you reference doesn't exist in the current repo, Git can't do anything with it. That's where the .gitmodules file comes in, to associate a given path with a repo, so that Git can look up the Commit object in that repo.
Re: Mounting Git commits as folders with NFS
#10Reminds me of Rational ClearCase, which probably inspired the idea. You could specify a "view" using tags, and it'd present it as a filesystem to remote machines. I think IBM now own them.
It also reminds me of ClearCase, which is why I kind of hate this, lol. ClearCase is fucking awful to work with, the last thing I want is to turn git into it.