Microsoft Announces Git Virtual File-System (GVFS)

[boxie]

What would be the advantage compared to this?

git clone --depth 1 path/to/repo.git

from my basic understanding (i have not gone further than the article) it would be that it hydrates the files the first time they are used, so if you only need to build a small portion you will only ever need a small part.

it would also save on disk space.

[ldo17]

The natural solution would be to organize the code properly

“Organize properly”?!? WINDOWS!!? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

[Guest]

sounds like microsoft might have some contributing to the git project to do so that it can handle 3.5 millions files easily... oh wait

Sounds like morons are saved by git. Moron company is moron company. Good to know m$ realized they're no match against Linux.

[Delgarde]

I know you're joking, but that's the kind of thing that probably no one decided. It just happened over a period of time and now it's too late to go back. I imagine that organizing that many files into sub modules would take centuries or something like that...

Yep. That's how these things inevitably work. In the old days of my current employer, we discovered pretty much every size limit built into Java by having our code grow big enough to be uncompilable. Max size of a class, max number of methods in a class, max size of a method... you name it, we broke it. We've gotten better at avoiding that kind of thing over the years, but we're still living with the mess created by some of the solutions to those problems...

[Guest]

“Organize properly”?!? WINDOWS!!? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

What a terrible, ugly and full of hacks this system is. The 'leaked' code was of course improved before publication by MS itself, but it still shows how crappy company it is. There are so many problems with Windows it makes me feel it's made by incompetent morons.

[Vistaus]

It's precisely because I use git that I appreciate being able to compare a file to any of its versions at any time. And I like it this way.

SVN and CVS are more suited for that (and maybe even Mercurial).

[GreatEmerald]

There is a scenario where git does not work properly. In video games you have lots of resource (like videos, images, audio) that can change a lot but you have to keep the history of the files. With this virtual filesystem you can choose not to download everything without sacrificing usability. Until now they used svn in this cases.

No, they use git and a shell script to download the assets from a cloud whenever needed.

[anda_skoa]

Well, at least they've realized that git is great…

They did so years ago.

At some point they switched Team Foundation Server to use git for the actual revision control.

Cheers,
_

[anda_skoa]

I imagine that organizing that many files into sub modules would take centuries or something like that...

Come on!

FOSS projects have switched from huge CVS/SVN repositories to split git repositories, e.g GNOME and KDE.
And these transitions didn take centuries.

Can't be unsurmountable for a company with full-time paid admins, can it?

Cheers,
_

[Vistaus]

Guess they are somehow try to use it like Piper, VisualSource Safe or ClearCase ...
There is no good OpenSource system which archives the functionality of Piper for example (permissions per subpath, only clone parts, have centralized "locking").. Guess git submodules are the closed thing that would resemble that.. But as well all know sub-modules don´t work that great..

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't svn have the features you mention (permissions per subpath, only clone parts, have centralized "locking")? I thought I read about those things being in svn on Superuser StackExchange. Or was it Mercurial?