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Windows Switch To Git Almost Complete: 8,500 Commits and 1,760 Builds Each Day (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the bigger-and-better dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Back in February, Microsoft made the surprising announcement that the Windows development team was going to move to using the open source Git version control system for Windows development. A little over three months after that first revelation, and about 90 percent of the Windows engineering team has made the switch. The Windows repository now has about 4,400 active branches, with 8,500 code pushes made per day and 6,600 code reviews each day. An astonishing 1,760 different Windows builds are made every single day -- more than even the most excitable Windows Insider can handle.

3 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Distributed Hg. by Daltorak · · Score: 4, Informative

    How come they didn't go with Mercurial?

    Some obvious reasons off the top of my head:

    1. - Visual Studio and TFS already have full CLI, GUI, and web-based support for Git. No such tooling exists for Mercurial.
    2. - Microsoft has contributed to libgit2 for years.
    3. - Mercurial is written in Python -- it's a small thing, but it's one more thing for a dev to maintain on their system.
    4. - Git is easier to hire for.

    You can also make the argument that Git was designed from the beginning to be suitable for developing an operating system. Or, put more bluntly, it was designed to be used by programmers who are smart enough to work on an operating system, Yes, the Mercurial CLI is generally easier to come to grips with, but that isn't a compelling enough reason on its own.

    Keep in mind also that the overall direction of Mercurial is increasingly being driven by the needs of Facebook's dev teams. Which is great to see, in the sense that they're returning their enhancements to the community..... but by and large they're building web properties, not operating systems, so the priorities may be different.

  2. Re:Linus Wins Again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    >embrace-extend-extinguish

    it's MIT license, you are free to make your own fork: https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS

  3. inaccurate by lucm · · Score: 5, Informative

    You obviously didn't RTFA. They had to create this GVFS thing because their code base is huge and they don't want to sync hundreds of gigs between remote locations. Also they were not using VSS before switching to Git, they were using Perforce.

    It's not a WTF. It's a great achievement and will probably become a standard component of large-scale git repos. If you ever had to deal with huge repos that are used by teams in many timezones you'd understand that.

    For reference, the Linux kernel git repo is about 6GB all in. The Windows git repo is 300GB. We can all guess that in that 300GB there's a fair amount of dead wood but still, in an era where storage is dirt cheap, one shouldn't have to trim down a code source repo because the vcs can't keep up.

    --
    lucm, indeed.