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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

#61

Post by outcoldman »

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? There are a lot of good CVS systems around. They just to give cool kids access to cool tools? I believe there are plenty bridges between CVS and git already implemented, which also allows you to checkout only part of the CVS tree.

At Splunk we had the same problem, our source code was stored in CVS (perforce), but we wanted to switch to git. And not only because we really wanted to use git, but to simplify our development process, mainly because of the much easier branching model (lightweight branching also is available in perforce, but to get it we still needed to do some upgrades on our servers). We also had a problem that at the beginning we had very large working tree, don't think it was 200-300Gb, I believe it was 10x less, and actually required 4-5 seconds for git status. This was not appropriate for us, so we worked on our source code and release builds to split it in several git repos to make sure that git status will take not more than 0.x seconds.

My point is use right tools for right jobs. 4-5 seconds for git status is still a huge problem, I would prefer to use CVS instead if that will not require me to wait 5 seconds for each git status invocation.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#62

Post by testUser69 »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #16
oneplane wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, yes. The mating call of the wild elite computer expert. Microsoft: "We, only one of most technologically advanced companies with only the 2nd or 3rd highest market cap of any public company on the planet depending on the day, had a problem with infrastructure trying to manage possibly the largest software project that anyone has ever made. And then we solved it." You: "Stop doing what you're doing and pay attenti…

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.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#63

Post by Ajedi32 »

cies wrote: post #55
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…

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.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#64

Post by xearl »

rethab wrote: post #37

Assuming that the repo was this big in the beginning, I wonder why the ever migrated to git (I'm assuming they did, because they can tell how long it takes to checkout). At least when somebody "tries" do the migration, wouldn't they realize that maybe git is not the right tool for them? Or did they actually migrate and then work with "git status" that take 10 minutes for some time until they realize they may need to…

To me it sounds like these numbers are from a migration-in-progress. So they are trying, but instead of giving up and saying "not the right tool for us" they are trying to improve the tool.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#65

Post by vtbassmatt »

UK-AL wrote: post #59
vtbassmatt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why Visual Studio Team Services is in scare quotes -- that's the product's name. And it's not an open source hosting service, which handily explains why Microsoft's open source isn't hosted there. Disclosure: I'm a PM on VSTS/TFS, and I own part of version control.

Just to say, I'm really liking modern VSTS.

Thank you!

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#66

Post by testUser69 »

Why is that so hard to believe? America is run by Donald Trump.

The problems with these companies is that developers aren't making technical decisions, it's executives who know nothing about computer science. That's why Windows 10 is such a mess with spyware and adware.

Now they have some FOSS advocate who doesn't really know anything about software or VCS but saw that an internal problem they were trying to solve was making their code base work with git. So he decided it would be really cool for Microsofts image to develop an open source extension of git, instead of actually solving the underlying problems (because he didn't recognize them). Now he's probably got a promotion at Microsoft for "fixing" their problem with git.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#68

Post by testUser69 »

bndr wrote: post #4
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…

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 sounds like it works by breaking down a "super repo" into small "sub repos". This actually makes sense.

There is no way working with a 300gb git repo is fun or efficient, and they've probably been doing that for years at Microsoft.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#69

Post by jgalt212 »

ksec wrote: post #58

Interesting M$ is moving to Git and the rest of the world is pretty much Github & alternatives while Facebook and Google are going with Mercurial. I actually liked Mercurial apart from its name being little hard to pronounce, but it doesn't seems to get used anywhere. So are the DVCS converging to Git and Git only?

In the open source areana, it certainly seems like the game is over. But as others mentioned, both FB and GOOG are big Mercurial users and contributors.

Our shop uses Mercurial becuase of its Python basis and the amount of time and effort it takes to master Git makes me draw strong and uncomfortable parallels to emacs.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#70

Post by ohitsdom »

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?

Reading release notes of TFS, they seem to be putting much more effort into improving integration with Git compared with TFVC. This may be just to catch up to acheive parity with TFVC in TFS, but it was enough for me to abandon TFVC for Git in all new projects.
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