VFSForGit VS gitignore

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.

In conclusion, the Gitignore repository stands as a testament to the power of collective knowledge and collaboration in software development. By providing a centralized repository of .gitignore templates, it empowers developers to streamline their workflow, maintain cleaner repositories, and focus on what they do best – writing exceptional code. As the software development landscape continues to evolve, the significance of .gitignore templates as indispensable tools for developers is set to endure.

The challenge here was actually from my #48in28 Exercism participation, where I am pretty familiar the standard layout for some repositories since I am familiar with tooling and language, working with new languages does not come with the same familiarity, so I found it made sense to use canonical definitions, hence the use of github/gitignore.

Add .env to your .gitignore file to prevent it from being committed. Here's an example file with it already added. You may also use dotenv for advanced configuration and it will automatically load environment variables from a .env file into process.env.

Here you can find ready-made .gitignore templates for various technologies and languages such as Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, and many others: https://github.com/github/gitignore/tree/main.

You could also use this git ignore template. Create you .gitignore and add the contents from that file in.

I've only used free Unity with GitHub or GitLab, professionally and reaching back into internships. One recommendation would be to use a slightly longer .gitignore than the default, like this one.

Virtual Environments are a feature that has been part of python itself since version 3.3. It allows you to isolate both a python version and any packages you install with it. Every python project I develop with uses a virtual environment for such isolation purposes. Now I generally like to create these virtual environments inside the target project's directory so I know exactly what it's tied to. If you use GitHub's python gitignore file naming the virtual environment folder as venv or .venv will ensure it doesn't get committed (which you don't want). So I'll make a new project folder and create a virtual environment inside of it:

Especially considering the GitHub .gitignore template for Node only ignores .env.local, not .local.env: https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/main/Node.gitignore...

# Get latest from https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/main/Unity.gitignore