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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

#71

Post by stephenr »

therealmarv wrote: post #12
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 seems you have no clue how very big companies work with source code management. Google e.g. is using for the most part only ONE single repository for their source code. So would you also say the same about them?

Yes?

Big companies, even successful companies aren't incapable of making, and continuing to make stupid decisions.

I'm sure each company has a reason for using a single massive repo. I doubt I would agree with their reason, but I'm sure they have one.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#72

Post by youdontknowtho »

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've always been surprised how much sympathy a company like IBM or Intel gets on HN. They both sue people over patents. That both contribute to non-free software. They were early backers of Linux, though, and that is what people care about superficially.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#73

Post by stephenr »

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?

> the rest of the world is pretty much Github & alternatives

By "the world" you mean, the HN/SV/startup crowd of cool-kids who feel the need to use whatever is popular without regard for how appropriate it is?

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#74

Post by wslh »

foxrob92 wrote: post #39
wslh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to choose very bad names like .NET or COM [1] (this predates Internet) makes searching information very tricky. MSDN doesn't help. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model

A few years ago I had to do some interfacing between python and some modelling software. I went through a COM interface, and it was a bloody nightmare to find docs. I later found out I could have looked for "ActiveX" and found similar results.

A few years ago your best friend would have been https://www.codeproject.com . The issue of searching difficult questions using another keyword (e.g. ActiveX) is that you can miss the only answer available. For common questions (with answers!) you can find an answer with all the variations.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#75

Post by CJefferson »

testUser69 wrote: post #62
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#76

Post by Ericson2314 »

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 worktree`. In other words there should be a system daemon managing a single global object store.

I wonder/hope IPFS can benefit from this implementation on Windows, where FUSE isn't an option.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#77

Post by fsckin »

daigoba66 wrote: post #14

The article doesn't directly say it, but are they migrating the Windows source code repository to git? That seems like a big deal. I seem to recall that Microsoft has previously used a custom Perforce "fork" for their larger code bases (Windows, Server, Office, etc.).

Source Depot. Forked years ago with tons of added features. Various Halo titles also used it and had easy to use integrations with most of the art and design pipeline tools.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#78

Post by ianopolous »

ianopolous wrote: post #52

Couldn't they use git over IPFS?

Not sure why I'm being down voted. It was a serious question. IPFS solves the handling of large files (by chunking them), and works in a P2P way in which you can locally mount remote merkle trees (the core data structure of git). I believe this use case is also actually one of the original design goals of IPFS.

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#79

Post by janwh »

mox1 wrote: post #35
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.

Yes they did. They choose to scale out Mecurial to solve their problem. Wonder if they still use Mercurial? https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...

They do. Durham Goode (Tech Lead on Source Control at Facebook) just held a talk at Git-Merge about how they scaled Mercurial at Fb. They seem to be quite happy with it, albeit applying quite a few restrictions on their internal users that are not really transferable to the general (outside-corporate) usage of VCS (for example only rebases are allowed, directly committing to master all the time, etc.)

Re: Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

#80

Post by adrianN »

vtbassmatt wrote: post #32
daigoba66 wrote: post #14

The article doesn't directly say it, but are they migrating the Windows source code repository to git? That seems like a big deal. I seem to recall that Microsoft has previously used a custom Perforce "fork" for their larger code bases (Windows, Server, Office, etc.).

Yes, Windows is migrating to Git.

Do you have a citation for that?
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