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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

#151

Post by acqq »

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

> just to give cool kids access to cool tools

Yes. DVCS with the huge code bases, large binary objects and large teams is hardly the optimal approach. But the "cool kids" are just used to use what they use. And now they can pretend to do it even when they have to be always connected, because the files are virtual and remain on the server until really used.

If Microsoft is giving the solution to the "cool kids," no reason to complain about the fact that Microsoft is willing to care for them.

And if you'd ask the "cool kids" why do they need git at all for such scenarios, have fun with the amount of arguments you'll get. Why this one "needs" vi and another "Emacs" etc. The same reasons. You'll find the arguments also in the comments here. Including mentions of Mercurial, the competition, just like "vi or Emacs". Because. Don't ask.

And no, as far as I understand, Google doesn't primarily "use Mercurial", they use something called Piper, and before they used a customized Perforce just like Microsoft did.

https://www.wired.com/2015/09/google-2-billion-lines-codeand...

"Piper spans about 85 terabytes of data" "and Google’s 25,000 engineers make about 45,000 commits (changes) to the repository each day. That’s some serious activity. While the Linux open source operating spans 15 million lines of code across 40,000 software files, Google engineers modify 15 million lines of code across 250,000 files each week."

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#152

Post by vertex-four »

testUser69 wrote: post #68
bndr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a normal practice, google does it also: "The Google codebase includes approximately one billion files and has a history of approximately 35 million commits spanning Google's entire 18-year existence. The repository contains 86TBa of data, including approximately two billion lines of code in nine million unique source files." [1] [1] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-store...

>The Git community strongly suggests and prefers developers have more and smaller repositories. A Git-clone operation requires copying all content to one's local machine, a procedure incompatible with a large repository. They aren't copying all the files like you do with Git. They have a custom set up that sounds like it lets you checkout just the parts you need. I don't have time to read the whole thing, but it soun…

> I don't have time to read the whole thing, but it sounds like it works by breaking down a "super repo" into small "sub repos".

They're explicitly not doing that. They have a massive, monolithic repo, and then tooling for interacting with that monolithic repo without having to grab the whole thing. They are not using Git. You just read the section titled "Alternatives".

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#153

Post by toyg »

ska wrote: post #136
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. Git wasn't the first, and even then had several contemporaries at 2nd gen.

Yup. I remember when git came along the field was already pretty crowded (DVCS, Darcs, Bazaar, BitKeeper, Mercurial...). I've always suspected Linus wrote git in a panic simply to sidestep the months of flames that switching VCS again would have inevitably generated, once BitKeeper stopped being viable. I also remember people jumping at the occasion like they would have never done to improve someone else's tool.

The story of git is a good case-study for people interested in group dynamics.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#154

Post by aanm1988 »

CJefferson wrote: post #75
testUser69 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more naive to believe that large companies always make the right decisions. We see Microsoft make mistake after mistake (look at windows 8, windows vista). The only time they fix their mistakes is when they're made public. So there is no reason to fix their mistake of a code base.

But, it seems all large companies (Facebook, Google, Microsoft) are using a mono-repo, and no-one is publicly admitting to using many small repos. If no company is using many small repos for truly massive projects, then it's hard to argue it would be a good idea. Could everyone who has looked at this problem make the wrong choice?

> no-one is publicly admitting to using many small repos.

Amazon. They built an entire system around managing versions so that they can make it work.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#155

Post by vvanders »

gvb wrote: post #42

Using git with large repos and large (binary blob) files has been a pain point for quite a while. There have been several attempts to solve the problem, none of which have really taken off. I think all the attempts have been (too) proprietary – without wide support, it doesn’t get adopted. I'll be watching this to see if Microsoft can break the logjam. By open sourcing the client and protocol, there is potential... O…

That still only solves half the problem with large binary blobs.

The other half is that almost all of the binary formats can't be merged and so you need a mechanism to lock them to prevent people from wiping out other people's changes. Unfortunately that runs pretty much counter the idea of DCVS.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#156

Post by olkid »

testUser69 wrote: post #2

>the Windows codebase has over 3.5 million files and is over 270 GB in size So instead of cleaning up this mess they decided to "fix" git? With this type of thing going on at MS it's no wonder Windows 10 is more buggy than my Linux box. Also why would they keep the entirety of "Windows" in one git repo? The only reason I can think to do this is if very large parts of the ecosystem are so tightly coupled together, tha…

> tightly coupled together

systemd

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#157

Post by scotty79 »

I had a medium sized project in Ruby on Rails as git repo inside vm.

It was slow to do 'git status' and other common commands. Restarting RoR app was also slo. I've put repo on RAM disk which made the whole experience at least few times faster.

Since all was in vm that I rarely restarted I didn't have to recreate files on ram disk all that often. I was syncing changes with the persistent disk with rsync running periodically.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#159

Post by coherentpony »

gumby wrote: post #137
coherentpony wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

"Let a thousand flowers bloom." Competition helps both sides. Clang became good enough that it spurred GCC to become a lot better. Until 1997, forking a project was considered a tragedy. I think things have improved since then :-).

Fair point.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#160

Post by voxic11 »

aanm1988 wrote: post #144
Analemma_ wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Note that Google and Facebook ran into the same problems Microsoft did, and their solution was to use Mercurial and build similar systems on top of it. Microsoft could've done that…

Google uses some variant of perforce, just like MS has been doing.

They used to, but now they use Piper which is built on top of mercurial.
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