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Windows Switch To Git Almost Complete: 8,500 Commits and 1,760 Builds Each Day (arstechnica.com)
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.
If you read TFA you'd have noticed that Microsoft isn't using Vanilla Git. Using their normal embrace-extend-extinguish mindset they've created their own GVFS (Git Virtual File System) and forks of Git server and client that only work in a GVFS-enabled ecosystem so that they can handle the massive number of files in the Windows source code.
The work they've done to make Git scale to fit their needs sounds great, and I see they've open-sourced the key components. That's awesome. At the moment it looks like GVFS is Windows-only (not a big surprise -- and not a complaint; they built what they needed). I'd like to see someone port it to Linux and make this infrastructure more broadly available. It sounds like it would be much nicer to work on than the "repo" tool that Android layers on top of Git to enable managing a whole bunch of smaller repositories.
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Interesting read, actually. They call it GVFS, but it is really just a more asynchronous mode for local git repositories. Traditional git downloads the whole repository as a local copy. It's a feature by design because it allows a developer to work completely offline and only do a git pull when ready to merge branches. It sounds like the Windows repository is a) large and monolithic, so a given developer team does not work on the entire codebase, and b) they frequently sync their changes to the central repository (ie: it is not really decentralized), so the traditional git model has shortcomings for them. One can argue about the structure of the Windows repository, but GVFS sounds like a nice feature to have regardless. The only question I have is...
The third thing the company has done is build a Git proxy server
Why didn't they just clone the Azure repository to somewhere on the East Coast? Git is designed to handle this type of replication, so why did they write a "proxy server" (not entirely sure what they mean by that).
We have Linus' famous picture on posters and t-shirts at my work. (NVIDIA)
My boss was sitting just a few feet beyond the camera when Linus had his rant too. It was epic, many of the Nvidians were squirming in their seat.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
And Microsoft is not using Linus' implementation of git, they have written their own (permissively licensed) version written in C#. So they're using their own VCS, which uses ideas from BitKeeper, and is interoperable with git.
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I won't spend time searching for you, but there are blog posts from softies describing the various attempts over the years to segregate code, and this is the result of that failure.
The evolution of windows from a DOS based illusion to a full client server model on a single computer resulted in a lot of bad decisions. Yes I'm aware of os2 and the parentage of XP via NT, but certain allowances were made so that Windows 98 and ME software would work on XP.
There was no management and grand plan. Reading Charles Petzold and Raymond Chen make that clear. The effort continues. But this is a normal software company trying to ship product, not meet the ivory tower ideal. Hardly a defense, but the info is all out there, mostly documented in this switch to git. Mark Russinovich, SysInternals, Alex Ionescu have the unofficial story, in a sense. How we got here is clear if you know the history.