Microsoft Introduces GVFS (Git Virtual File System) (microsoft.com)

Saeed Noursalehi, principal program manager at Microsoft, writes on a blog post: We've been working hard on a solution that allows the Git client to scale to repos of any size. Today, we're introducing GVFS (Git Virtual File System), which virtualizes the file system beneath your repo and makes it appear as though all the files in your repo are present, but in reality only downloads a file the first time it is opened. GVFS also actively manages how much of the repo Git has to consider in operations like checkout and status, since any file that has not been hydrated can be safely ignored. And because we do this all at the file system level, your IDEs and build tools don't need to change at all! In a repo that is this large, no developer builds the entire source tree. Instead, they typically download the build outputs from the most recent official build, and only build a small portion of the sources related to the area they are modifying. Therefore, even though there are over 3 million files in the repo, a typical developer will only need to download and use about 50-100K of those files. With GVFS, this means that they now have a Git experience that is much more manageable: clone now takes a few minutes instead of 12+ hours, checkout takes 30 seconds instead of 2-3 hours, and status takes 4-5 seconds instead of 10 minutes. And we're working on making those numbers even better.

Comments

Did they just turn git into svn?

[lucasnate1]

The whole point of git is that you have identical copy on your machine. Why take away git's biggest advantage?

Re:Did they just turn git into svn?

[thegarbz]

The whole point of git is that you have identical copy on your machine. Why take away git's biggest advantage?

Because it's biggest advantage is also one of it's greatest inefficiencies and frankly on a large project chances are you may not need it all. The whole point is you have an identical copy on your machine of what you're working on

Re:Ah nostalgia

[AuMatar]

The fact you needed a release team and release engineers to manage a clear case implementation is why its considered one of the worst systems out there, remembered with hatred by almost everyone who used it. A version control system should be easily set up by one admin in an hour or two, and then usable without reams of documentation by any of the engineers. ClearCase failed that.