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Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

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Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#111

Post by sytse »

tambourine_man wrote: post #85

It's interesting how all the cool things seem to come from Microsoft these days. I still think we need something better than Git, though. It brought some very cool ideas and the inner workings are reasonably understandable, but the UI is atrociously complicated. And yes, dealing with large files is a very sore point. I'd love to see a second attempt at a distributed version control system. But I applaud MS's initiati…

Maybe something that has the data models of git but has a more consistent interface? Today on Git Merge there was a presentation about http://gitless.com/

For example one of the goals is to always allow you to switch branches. Stash and stash pop would happen automatically and it would even work if you're in the middle of a merge.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#113

Post by coherentpony »

tambourine_man wrote: post #85

It's interesting how all the cool things seem to come from Microsoft these days. I still think we need something better than Git, though. It brought some very cool ideas and the inner workings are reasonably understandable, but the UI is atrociously complicated. And yes, dealing with large files is a very sore point. I'd love to see a second attempt at a distributed version control system. But I applaud MS's initiati…

> I'd love to see a second attempt at a distributed version control system.

Out of curiosity, why a whole new attempt? Personally, I'd prefer the approach of "making our current tools better."

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#114

Post by StavrosK »

sytse wrote: post #111
tambourine_man wrote: post #85

It's interesting how all the cool things seem to come from Microsoft these days. I still think we need something better than Git, though. It brought some very cool ideas and the inner workings are reasonably understandable, but the UI is atrociously complicated. And yes, dealing with large files is a very sore point. I'd love to see a second attempt at a distributed version control system. But I applaud MS's initiati…

Maybe something that has the data models of git but has a more consistent interface? Today on Git Merge there was a presentation about http://gitless.com/ For example one of the goals is to always allow you to switch branches. Stash and stash pop would happen automatically and it would even work if you're in the middle of a merge.

I quite love both the motivation and the implementation of gitless (and the choices they've made). I find it much more usable than git.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#115

Post by youdontknowtho »

jjjingleheimer wrote: post #105
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…

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?

that's a good point. its funny, though, that they have actually started doing a lot of things for PR purposes that i van only imagine that most of their customers couldn't really care less about.

for example, the majority of their money still comes from windows and office, but open source and hologram BS impress the most vocal anti-MS voices in the media.

my point, though, is that there are other companies that dont draw nearly as much ire that engage in the exact same practices. i think, that early antagonism between MS and Linux users has become a tribal signifier for some people. Microsoft people used to have the same kind of relationship with IBM. They also kept flogging that longer than it really made sense...just like linux and mac fans.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#116

Post by jjjingleheimer »

youdontknowtho wrote: post #115
jjjingleheimer wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

that's a good point. its funny, though, that they have actually started doing a lot of things for PR purposes that i van only imagine that most of their customers couldn't really care less about. for example, the majority of their money still comes from windows and office, but open source and hologram BS impress the most vocal anti-MS voices in the media. my point, though, is that there are other companies that dont…

yeah, microsoft fans used to think that IBM was literally the devil. turns out they were just another inept global company schlepping its way through history. "microsoft fans" isnt something that you hear that much anymore.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#117

Post by WorldMaker »

jonknee wrote: post #104
outcoldman wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm curious to dig a bit further in, but from the blog post I get the impression that they are also still cloning the full commit history, just not the full file trees attached to the commits and definitely not the full worktree of HEAD, leaving those to be lazily fetched. If that is the case, that sounds like an interesting compromise on the git model and something verging on some of the speculative ideas I've seen about using something like IPFS to back git's trees, to the point where maybe you could use something IPFS in tango with this and have a good DVCS solution.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#118

Post by ianopolous »

janwh wrote: post #110
ianopolous wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You would probably still need the changes they made to Git itself. But fundamentally IPFS is also a filesystem virtualization layer (so should be able to do everything their file system virtualization is doing - if it doesn't already), and inherently has lazy checkouts.

The main added benefit is that if your friend on the LAN has also checked out the parts you need you can get them directly from them rather than some central repo, which could make a big difference in a company of 10's of thousands of employees.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#119

Post by jauco »

klodolph wrote: post #91
outcoldman wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

> I believe there are plenty bridges between CVS and git already implemented, which also allows you to checkout only part of the CVS tree. How many of them have you used? I've used a couple, to interact with large code bases on the rough order of 300GB. In my experience they don't work very well, because you have to be hygienic about the commands you run or some part of your Git state gets out of sync with some part…

A bit of a topic highjack, but I'm always curious how "many people committing very often on the same branch" works in practice. I'd expect there to be livelock like scenario's.

Do you need to do anything special? Or is this just a non-issue? Doy you push to master or do you use some sort of pull request gui (like github or phabricator)

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#120

Post by manojlds »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #76

If I understand this correctly, unlike git-annex and git lfs, this not about extending the git format with special large files, but changing the algorithm for the current data format. A custom filesystem is indeed the correct approach, and one that git itself should have probably supported long ago. In fact, there should really only be one "repo" per machine, name-spaced branches, and multiple mountpoints a la `git w…

The blog post does mention that some changes have been made to git (in their fork)
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