Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System • Hacker News Board

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#101

Post by floopidydoopidy » Fri, Feb 03, 2017, 4:09 PM UTC

youdontknowtho wrote: post #72

kentt wrote: post #22

It's disappointing that all the comments are so negative. This is a great idea and solves a real problem for a lot of use cases. I remembering years ago Facebook says it had this problem. A lot of the comments were centered around that you could change your codebase to for what git can do. I'm glad there's another option now.

I was actually surprised that there was only as much negative sentiment as there is. Microsoft could cure cancer and the post to HN would be mostly negative. It's tribal. It doesn't even matter what they do at this point. That being said, you can see more and more people getting off the "Microsoft is evil" train. It's super slow and every bone headed thing that Microsoft does resets the needle for lots of people. I'v…

This is just more of their embrace, extend, extinguish campaign. This is the extend part.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#102

Post by espadrine » Fri, Feb 03, 2017, 4:10 PM UTC

outcoldman wrote: post #61

kentt wrote: post #22

It's disappointing that all the comments are so negative. This is a great idea and solves a real problem for a lot of use cases. I remembering years ago Facebook says it had this problem. A lot of the comments were centered around that you could change your codebase to for what git can do. I'm glad there's another option now.

Also don't think that this is a good idea. Git is a Distributed Version Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control , the main benefit of which is "allows many software developers to work on a given project without requiring them to share a common network". Seems like with GVFS they are making DVC to be a CVS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System ) again. What is the point?…

It is not clear from the announcement nor the code, but in principle, I don't see a reason that it can't be a DVCS.

Sure, GVFS downloads files only when first read; but maybe it keeps them cached? Maybe you can still work on them and commit changes after you get offline? At least in principle, nothing prevents that.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#103

Post by youdontknowtho » Fri, Feb 03, 2017, 4:13 PM UTC

floopidydoopidy wrote: post #101

youdontknowtho wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually surprised that there was only as much negative sentiment as there is. Microsoft could cure cancer and the post to HN would be mostly negative. It's tribal. It doesn't even matter what they do at this point. That being said, you can see more and more people getting off the "Microsoft is evil" train. It's super slow and every bone headed thing that Microsoft does resets the needle for lots of people. I'v…

This is just more of their embrace, extend, extinguish campaign. This is the extend part.

yep. you got it one, wiley coyote.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#104

Post by jonknee » Fri, Feb 03, 2017, 4:16 PM UTC

outcoldman wrote: post #61

kentt wrote: post #22

It's disappointing that all the comments are so negative. This is a great idea and solves a real problem for a lot of use cases. I remembering years ago Facebook says it had this problem. A lot of the comments were centered around that you could change your codebase to for what git can do. I'm glad there's another option now.

Also don't think that this is a good idea. Git is a Distributed Version Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control , the main benefit of which is "allows many software developers to work on a given project without requiring them to share a common network". Seems like with GVFS they are making DVC to be a CVS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System ) again. What is the point?…

> Seems like with GVFS they are making DVC to be a CVS again. What is the point?

It sounds like they answered that:

> In a repo that is this large, no developer builds the entire source tree. Instead, they typically download the build outputs from the most recent official build, and only build a small portion of the sources related to the area they are modifying. Therefore, even though there are over 3 million files in the repo, a typical developer will only need to download and use about 50-100K of those files.

Source will still be distributed among the developers that touch it. Seems like a decent compromise.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#105

Post by jjjingleheimer » Fri, Feb 03, 2017, 4:16 PM UTC

youdontknowtho wrote: post #72

kentt wrote: post #22

It's disappointing that all the comments are so negative. This is a great idea and solves a real problem for a lot of use cases. I remembering years ago Facebook says it had this problem. A lot of the comments were centered around that you could change your codebase to for what git can do. I'm glad there's another option now.

I was actually surprised that there was only as much negative sentiment as there is. Microsoft could cure cancer and the post to HN would be mostly negative. It's tribal. It doesn't even matter what they do at this point. That being said, you can see more and more people getting off the "Microsoft is evil" train. It's super slow and every bone headed thing that Microsoft does resets the needle for lots of people. I'v…

to be fair, i cant say that i care if people are fair to a multinational corporation. whether linux fans are right or not they are still only doing whats best for their bottom line. should a company get a trophy for doing what its customers want?

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#106

Post by chokolad » Fri, Feb 03, 2017, 4:17 PM UTC

There is a discussion thread on r/programming, where MS folks, who implemented this answer questions. A lot of questions like why not use multiple repos, why not git-lfs, why not git subtree, etc. are answered there

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5rtlk0/git_vir...

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#107

Post by Spivak » Fri, Feb 03, 2017, 4:18 PM UTC

cafebabbe wrote: post #94

My sysadmin: "we won't switch to git because it can't handle binary files and our code base is too big" Our whole codebase is 800MB.

Isn't that the case that LFS solves? I've got 30ish gigs of binary blobs stored in my repos.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#108

Post by rplnt » Fri, Feb 03, 2017, 4:20 PM UTC

anon987 wrote: post #34

kentt wrote: post #22

It's disappointing that all the comments are so negative. This is a great idea and solves a real problem for a lot of use cases. I remembering years ago Facebook says it had this problem. A lot of the comments were centered around that you could change your codebase to for what git can do. I'm glad there's another option now.

It's because the 'problem' it solves is a corner case that's rarely encountered. I love their absurd examples of repos that take 12 hours to download. How many people have that problem, really? All they did is create a caching layer.

Well it's a problem for thousands of employees of Microsoft, isn't it? We've had much smaller repository (10GB IIRC) and it really was annoying how long everything took, even with various caches and what not enabled.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#109

Post by WorldMaker » Fri, Feb 03, 2017, 4:20 PM UTC

Ajedi32 wrote: post #63

cies wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Joey Hess' attempt at "solving the problem" deserves a mention. It is open source (GPLV3) licensed. [not proprietary] Written in Haskell. [cool aid] Currently has 1200+ stars on Github and is part of at least Ubuntu ( http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=git-annex ) since 12.04. [shows something for support and adoption] edit: Link to Github https://github.com/joeyh/git-annex -- thanks dgellow

For the problem of large files I think Git LFS has largely won out over git annex, mostly because it's natively supported by GitHub and GitLab and requires no workflow changes to use.

Atlassian's Bitbucket and Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services both also support Git LFS.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#110

Post by janwh » Fri, Feb 03, 2017, 4:22 PM UTC

ianopolous wrote: post #90

janwh wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was explained in the talk at Git-Merge that their problem is not large files per se. The codebase is huge in the amount of source files alone. It was stated that the repo contains about 3.5 million files. Having IPFS here wouldn't help, would it?

yes, IPFS is designed to host the entire internet. You can selectively mount sub-graphs arbitrarily, which means only downloading locally exactly what you need.

Unfortunately that alone would not have allowed Git to be fast on such a huge repository. Normally (without tools as sparse-checkouts) Git would read all files for example on git status. Therefore IPFS would also download all files locally, making it a moot addition.