Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

danielsada.tech

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 290 posts

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#32

Post by dboreham »

dangus wrote: post #12
pm90 wrote: post #5

Its oddly fascinating that Microsoft has managed to survive for so long with ancient/bad tools for software engineering. Almost like “life finds a way” but for software dev. From the outside it seems like they are doing better now after embracing OSS/generic dev tools.

Let’s not forget that Microsoft developed a lot of tools in the first place, as in, they were one of the companies that created things that didn’t really exist before Microsoft created them. Git isn’t even very old, it came out in 2005. Microsoft Office first came out in 1990. Of course Office wasn’t using git.

Some examples would be useful here. Not knocking MS tools in general but are there any that were industry fists? Source code control for example existed at least since SCCS which in turn predates Microsoft itself.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#33

Post by MBCook »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #10

We communicated the same information through multiple channels: weekly emails, Teams, wiki docs, team presentations, and office hours. The rule: if something was important, people heard it at least 3 times through different mediums. If only this were standard. Last week I received the only notification that a bunch of internal systems were being deleted in two weeks . No scream test, no archiving, just straight delet…

No kidding. The amount of things that change in important environments without anyone telling people outside their teams in some organizations can be maddening.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#35

Post by 90s_dev »

gmueckl wrote: post #28
90s_dev wrote: post #14

I actually remember using Perforce back in like 2010 or something. And I can't remember why or for which client or employer. I just remember it was stupid.

Perforce is convoluted and confusing, but I don't think it's really fair to call it stupid. It is still virtually unmatched in a couple of areas.

I wasn't being fair, I was being mean. Perforce is stupid and ugly.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#37

Post by bigbuppo »

speed_spread wrote: post #20
senkora wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft had to collaborate with GitHub to invent the Virtual File System for Git (VFS for Git) just to make this migration possible. Without VFS, a fresh clone of the Office repository (a shallow git clone would take 200 GB of disk space) would take days and consume hundreds of gigabytes.

Having had yesterday the dubious pleasure of using MS Word for the first time in a decade, I can safely affirm that they could have have just piped the whole Office repo to the Windows equivalent of /dev/null and nothing of value would have been lost.

The worst part about Word is that it has been feature complete since Office 97, except they've made the UI worse each and every version since then. I wish I could get excited about a new version of Office or WordPerfect, but neither Microsoft or Corel has figured out how to innovate in the past three decades. And no, slapping """AI""" in there isn't the solution. There are so many possibities but they just sort of do nothing with it now that they make a few billion a month on Microsoft 365 subscriptions.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#38

Post by TowerTall »

golergka wrote: post #29
senkora wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft had to collaborate with GitHub to invent the Virtual File System for Git (VFS for Git) just to make this migration possible. Without VFS, a fresh clone of the Office repository (a shallow git clone would take 200 GB of disk space) would take days and consume hundreds of gigabytes.

It takes less than an hour on my third world apartment wifi to download Call of Duty Modern Warfare remake which is over 200 gygabytes. Since we're not talking about remote work here, I think Microsoft offices and servers (probably on local network) might have managed similar bandwidth back then.

There is a lot more to it than that. Check out "The largest Git repo on the planet" by Brian Harry who was in charge of the git migration and Azure DevOps (Microsoft's pendant to GitHub)

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-o...

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#39

Post by dshacker »

carlual wrote: post #24

> Authenticity mattered more than production value. Thanks for sharing this authentic story! As an ex-MSFT in a relatively small product line that only started switching to Git from SourceDepot in 2015, right before I left, I can truly empathize with how incredible a job you guys have done!

Yeah, it was a whole journey. I can't believe it happened. Thanks for your comment.
Post reply on HN