Microsoft is augmenting Windows 10 and the Visual Studio IDE with a file system to assist developers working with large Git repos.
The company’s Git Virtual File System (GVFS), appearing in GitHub, allows the Git client to scale to repos of any size. It virtualizes the file system beneath a repo to make it appear as though all files in a repo are present, but it downloads a file only the first time it’s opened.
In explaining Microsoft’s motivation, Saeed Noursalehi, Microsoft program manager for Visual Studio Cloud Services, said the company had been bumping up against the client’s limits. “For example, the Windows codebase has over 3.5 million files and is over 270GB in size. The Git client was never designed to work with repos with that many files or that much content.” GVFS manages how much of the repo Git has to consider in operations like checkout and status; any file not already hydrated can be ignored.
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Source: News Feed