VFSForGit VS cli

It's not only Windows that uses Git at Microsoft, but Sharepoint and Office (which includes the on-prem version of SharePoint). In terms of repo size Windows and Office are similar. I was part of the team that migrated Sharepoint from a Perforce clone to Git and helped build the tooling to allow Office to move as well. VFS for Git [1] and Scalar [2] are really good pieces of software.

[1] - https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit

[2] - https://github.com/microsoft/scalar

Congratulations! That means you basically figured out how the clone procedure works and found a way to do so just in a partial way (also in an unsafe way). But it is a cool idea, nonetheless.

Also check out the Scalar [1] project and its predecessor, GVFS [2], both from Microsoft to manage their monorepo via a VFS layer.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/scalar

[2]: https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit

VFS for Git is still Open Source: https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit

Microsoft's blog posts have indicated a move to use something as close to off-the-shelf git as possible, though. They say they've stopped using VFS much and are instead more often relying on sparse checkouts. They've upstreamed a lot of patches into git itself, and maintain their own git fork but the fork distance is generally shrinking as those patches upstream.

https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit

better than it used to, with the caveat that git in particular is not and has never claimed to be good at versioning blobs.

Oh dear you're not going to like this.

It’s virtualised file system: https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit, only downloads what you actually use. Same thing in every large company, but different implementations.

This is where something like VFSForGit[0] helps out. Instead of cloning the entire repo, it creates a virtual file system and fetches objects on demand. MSFT uses it internally for the Windows source tree (which now exceeds 300GB).

[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit

There's also a performance consideration. Not excluding /bin/ or /obj/ folders means dependencies are being tracked as well, and sometimes dependencies themselves are bigger than the program's source code itself. This is commonly the case with node projects, as the node_modules folder can balloon to hundreds of megabytes. They should never be tracked in git due to the nature of how git's internal database works. For e.g. if you delete a dependency because it's no longer needed, you can never fully reclaim that disk space (at least for the master branch) as git will need to keep the binary data stored in its internal tracking database because a previous commit in the master branch has captured the data. As you make more branches, git needs to store the data required to reconstruct your repo to a different state when you switch branches. When a branch has changes measured in the kilobytes, check out is very manageable, but when the differences balloon to many MBs due to the presence of heavy binary files, then checkout between different branches/commits can get very slow. Though, this happens anyway when source code data eventually reaches a certain threshold, beyond the hundreds of megabytes, it's made unnecessarily worse by including any binary files. It's one of the reasons Microsoft created VFS for git: https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit.

You mean like VFSforGit? Or the successor for that called Scalar? This has been a solved problem. Microsoft moved their entire Windows codebase to git. There have been a ton of huge improvements to performance as a result of that. And the above two plugins are easily better ways to deal with what you're referring to without resulting to dead tech.

This package is widely used for powerful CLI builds, it is used for example for Kubernetes CLI and GitHub CLI, in addition to offering some cool features such as automatic completion of shell, automatic recognition of flags (the tags) , and you can use -h or -help for example, among other facilities.

This Docker image is designed to support implementing Github Actions with Python. As of version 4.0.0., it starts with the official python docker image as the base which is a Debian OS. It specifically uses python:3-slim to keep the image size down for faster loading of Github Actions that use pyaction. On top of the base, we've installed curl gpg, git, and the GitHub CLI. We added curl and gpg because they are needed to install the GitHub CLI, and they may come in handy anyway (especially curl) when implementing a GitHub Action.

You might be interested in GitHub's cli tool, which is open source, if you want to access GitHub without running their proprietary JS code.

https://cli.github.com/

👉 Note: This script uses the GitHub CLI. So make sure you've installed that if you haven't already. Instructions here.

View on GitHub

(Context: I'm pretty thick into Nix, and have been for about four years. Most of this post is focussed on the NixOS desktop experience, so DevOps nerds, ymmv.)

Unpopular opinion: Nix is not that hard.

What's "hard" from a nix-promotion strategy is motivating people to understand why they would want the benefits it offers. Mostly because Nix, especially with home-manager, dramatically worsens UX for several day-to-day tasks, simply by violating the Law of Least Surprise every couple of hours in normal use.

I want a fully idempotent, version-locked, rewindable user environment, with a version-controlled central config, because I have half a dozen devices that, for reasons, I need to keep perfectly interchangeable with one another. Most users do not want this, for the simple fact that mutating their configs and differentiating them locally on specific machines is not a bug, but a feature.

Even more than that, it's an expectation that most software developers share as well.

Case in point: I filed a bug against the GitHub CLI last week. If any org has the scope and motivation to build software that's compatible with NixOS, an OS most of whose users are developers, it should be GitHub, which is, at least notionally, all about developers, developers, developers. A change in GH required a config format migration, which was sensibly done by opening the config .yml and rewriting it.

Of course, this breaks NixOS not just in practice but in principle. NixOS/home-manager makes config files read-only. Surprise! https://github.com/cli/cli/issues/8462

The response from GitHub was basically, "yeah, we knew this was going to happen, we mentioned it to the packagers at NixOS, but we did it anyway, because it was still the best way to proceed for us." (And they weren't wrong.)

Now, once a month is an annoyance, but I run into these problems daily. I can't imagine any sane person -- which I am not -- would persist with using it.

Why do I keep using NixOS, then? Because I am terribly and disproprotionately annoyed by small changes in my user experience, which I find disruptive to my workflow and hence threaten my success. For me, forbidding apps from mutating the config files I established for them is a selling point. Being able to version-control an idempotent declarative config for all of them at once is heaven.

Unless you're like me, you'll hate NixOS. But some were meant for Nix.

Because

To use a proper dynamic auth for ghcr.io you can create a "credential helper" and then it is supported by flux, see here: https://fluxcd.io/flux/cheatsheets/oci-artifacts/#authentication Unfortunately the "official" credential helper for ghcr.io doesn't exist. I use this simple script as a helper: https://gist.github.com/pkit/a98411d21ecc9293066f4579088187d1 Which requires gh cli to be installed.

This Docker image is designed to support implementing Github Actions with Python. As of version 4.0.0., it starts with the official python docker image as the base which is a Debian OS. It specifically uses python:3-slim to keep the image size down for faster loading of Github Actions that use pyaction. On top of the base, we've installed curl gpg, git, and the GitHub CLI. We added curl and gpg because they are needed to install the GitHub CLI, and they may come in handy anyway (especially curl) when implementing a GitHub Action.

Two CLI tools I install right away are the GitHub CLI (via brew) and the Netlify CLI (via npm).

From the second article, a minor point but possibly helpful to other here, he contrasts doing everything in the terminal with stacked commits vs going to the Github UI. If people aren't aware, Github offers a cli tool[1]. I've been using it for a few months now and am finding it does make me more productive -- it's nice to be able to open up a PR directly from my terminal. I do still use the GH UI for a lot of things, but I'll often at least start in the terminal, and it also makes the transition from terminal to browser easy as many commands support the `--web` flag open up the right page for you (eg `gh repo view --web`).

[1] https://cli.github.com/