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

Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 287 posts

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#21

Post by klodolph »

oneplane wrote: post #3
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…

This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the article. There is no reason for any Git repo to be that big. It's not a bug in Git, but more like a reasonable limit... if your project exceeds it, you're doing it wrong. I'm also curious as to how they used to do it without git, maybe using TFS? I wonder what the timings on that were. Anyway, I don't think GVFS is the way to go, and I hope that it either doesn't ge…

The problem with this argument is that it doesn't really explain why large repos are wrong. It turns out the choice between monorepo and multi repo does not have a one-size-fits-all answer. Microsoft can make their own tooling, and internal tools don't have to run outside of Microsoft so they're easier to develop.

Google reportedly used to use Perforce for their monolithic codebase, and Facebook is supposed to use Mercurial with a bunch of modifications. They all have huge code bases mostly in one repo (I've heard Facebook had a >50GB Git repository, and Google's codebase is supposed to be in the TB range).

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#22

Post by kentt »

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.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#23

Post by CJefferson »

oneplane wrote: post #3
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…

This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the article. There is no reason for any Git repo to be that big. It's not a bug in Git, but more like a reasonable limit... if your project exceeds it, you're doing it wrong. I'm also curious as to how they used to do it without git, maybe using TFS? I wonder what the timings on that were. Anyway, I don't think GVFS is the way to go, and I hope that it either doesn't ge…

I don't see why there should be limits.

I recently ran some experiments, one file per experiment, one result file per experiment. At around 100,000 files, git started getting very upset. Why shouldn't I be allowed to have 100,000 files, or a million files, in a directory? Why should it be my job, as a user, to manually rearrange my data into a format my computer is happier with?

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#27

Post by Navarr »

This sounds like a solid use case and a solid extension for that use case - but definitely not the end-all-be-all.

For one, it's not really distributed if you're only downloading when you need that specific file.

But that doesn't change the merrits of this at all, I think.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#28

Post by Longhanks »

sametmax wrote: post #13
dewyatt wrote: post #5

I think they could have picked a name that doesn't conflict with GNOME Virtual File System (GVfs).

That's what my first thought. "dick move". But they probably didn't know about it.

This is Microsoft. Before announcing a product they have more than enough lawyers to check the name for any clashes.

They just came to the conclusion thas GNOME's product is no threat and that they can just claim the name. Smaller companies [1] tried that before.

[1]: https://www.groupon.com/blog/cities/groupon-launches-gnome

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#29

Post by garysieling »

oneplane wrote: post #3
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…

This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the article. There is no reason for any Git repo to be that big. It's not a bug in Git, but more like a reasonable limit... if your project exceeds it, you're doing it wrong. I'm also curious as to how they used to do it without git, maybe using TFS? I wonder what the timings on that were. Anyway, I don't think GVFS is the way to go, and I hope that it either doesn't ge…

Being able to use git for things it's not designed for would be a strength, e.g. it works great as a database for certain kinds of projects.

I put all the records for https://www.findlectures.com in it, because then I can use diff tools for testing changes. Obviously this is nowhere near the size of the Windows codebase, but I could see a world where GVFS would be helpful for collaboration on this project.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#30

Post by daigoba66 »

krishoog wrote: post #17

Does this article imply that Microsoft itself is also moving towards Git? Instead of e.g. using their own product like TFS?

TFS has first-class support for Git repositories (in addition to the classic TFSVC repositories). So yes, they're moving more and more to Git. But no, they're not abandoning TFS.

Interestingly, however, most of their "open source" efforts (.NET, C#, and related) are all on GitHub rather than their own hosted offerings: CodePlex (which is basically dead) or "Visual Studio Team Services".

Post reply on HN