Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System

Re:Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System by bndr on Friday February 03, 2017 @09:12AM (#13559869)

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...

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Re:Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System by testUser69 on Friday February 03, 2017 @10:17AM (#13560294)

>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.

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Re:Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System by vertex-four on Friday February 03, 2017 @12:17PM (#13561367)

> 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".

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