git-lfs VS git

What's the difference between this and Git-LFS?

https://git-lfs.com/

It doesn't, since Git's data model has to be changed to content-defined chunks to solve the issue.

You should look at git-lfs[1] instead.

[1] https://git-lfs.com

Congrats on the HN launch. How does this improve or expand or blow git-lfs[1] out of the water because if I needed large blob file support it's what I would use instead. It offers pointers to the big files to the hosted git instead of pushing around the binaries itself -- though I am speculating since I've not used it myself just read about it online.

[1] https://git-lfs.com/

Specifics depend on project types, but literate programming[0] and using/enforcing coding/git/versioning standards helps. re: outdated responses -- email list for 'new/updated version available' with errata/change log location.

[0] : https://blog.bitsrc.io/literate-programming-a-radical-approa...

[1] : https://blog.codacy.com/coding-standards

[2] : https://github.com/git-lfs/git-lfs/blob/main/.github/workflo...

fine with layers: e.g., large binary files via git-lfs (https://git-lfs.com) and merge conflicts in non-textual files by custom merge resolvers like Unity’s (https://flashg.github.io/GitMerge-for-Unity/).

Perhaps in the future, almost everyone will keep using Git at the core, but have so many layers to make it more intuitive and provide better merges, that what they’re using barely resembles Git at all. This flexibility and the fact that nearly everything is designed for Git and integrates with Git, are why I doubt it’s ever going away.

Some alternatives for thought:

- pijul (https://pijul.org), a completely different VCS which allegedly has better merges/rebases. In beta, but I rarely hear about it nowadays and have heard more bad than good. I don’t think we can implement this alternate rebases in Git, but maybe we don’t need to; even after reading the website, I don’t understand why pijul’s merges are better, and in particular I can’t think of a concrete example nor does pijul provide one.

- Unison (https://www.unison-lang.org). This isn’t a VCS, but a language with a radical approach to code representation: instead of code being text stored in files, code is ASTs referenced by hash and stored in essentially a database. Among other advantages, the main one is that you can rename symbols and they will automatically propagate to dependencies, because the symbols are referenced by their hash instead of their name. I believe this automatic renaming will be common in the future, whether it’s implemented by a layer on top of Git or alternate code representation like Unison (to be clear, Unison’s codebases are designed to work with Git, and the Unison project itself is stored in Git repos).

- SVN, the other widespread VCS. Google or ask ChatGPT “Git vs SVN” and you’ll get answers like this (https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/svn-vs-git/, https://stackoverflow.com/a/875). Basically, SVN is easier to understand and handles large files better, Git is decentralized and more popular. But what about the differences which can’t be resolved by layers, like lazygit for intuition and git-lfs for large files? It seems to me like even companies with centralized private repositories use Git, meaning Git will probably win in the long term, but I don’t work at those companies so I don’t really know.

- Mercurial and Fossil, the other widespread VCSs. It seems these are more similar to Git and the main differences are in the low-level implementation (https://stackoverflow.com/a/892688, https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.wiki#....). It actually seems like most people prefer Mercurial and Fossil over Git and would use them if they had the same popularity, or at least if they had Git’s popularity and Git had Mercury or Fossil’s. But again, these VCSs are so similar that with layers, you can probably create a Git experience which has their advantages and almost copies their UI.

> I don’t know what that is

its a standard output from `go doc`, rendered as HTML. if you dont recognize that, then you aren't really in a position to be commenting on the topic. nothing is stopping anyone from pinning to a tag:

https://github.com/git-lfs/git-lfs/tags

or even a commit and relying of a specific version of the software. yes upgrades might be painful but a module IS available.

# git push origin feature-branch /usr/bin/gh auth git-credential get: 1: /usr/bin/gh auth git-credential get: /usr/bin/gh: not found /usr/bin/gh auth git-credential store: 1: /usr/bin/gh auth git-credential store: /usr/bin/gh: not found Enumerating objects: 9228, done. Counting objects: 100% (7495/7495), done. Delta compression using up to 8 threads Compressing objects: 100% (2090/2090), done. Writing objects: 100% (6033/6033), 72.77 MiB | 7.39 MiB/s, done. Total 6033 (delta 4402), reused 5194 (delta 3616) remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (4402/4402), completed with 477 local objects. remote: error: Trace: c1c90b47a5483929dcdd8c974a6c7d0695e86f67f680d8b88b80ef1c1bce74a remote: error: See https://gh.io/lfs for more information. remote: error: File deployment_20200220.sql is 872.78 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100.00 MB remote: error: GH001: Large files detected. You may want to try Git Large File Storage - https://git-lfs.github.com. To https://github.com/my-org/my-project.git ! [remote rejected] rest-logging -> rest-logging (pre-receive hook declined) error: failed to push some refs to 'https://github.com/my-org/my-project.git'

Microsoft had a bunch of solutions to handle their massive Windows repo: VFS for Git (GVFS), Scalar, and now it has a bunch of MS specific patches on top of the official git client, but apparently that one is also not required any more as partial clone is now supported on azure as well (which is another such implementation from Microsoft employees that made it to both GitHub and upstream git).

https://github.blog/2020-01-17-bring-your-monorepo-down-to-s...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/introducing-scalar/

https://github.com/microsoft/git

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/git-partial-clone-now-...

That was discontinued (like multiple times under different names). And is moved into a git fork. https://github.com/microsoft/git

Interesting! It seems some of Scalar from late 2021 has already made it into the official git project's contrib dir [0]. It looks like Scalar is mostly an opinionated way to configure git [1], especially by using git partial-clone.

Git partial-clone looks almost perfect, except it only downloads and displays files explicitly added to the git sparse-checkout list. I want some "magic" vfs shenanigans that lets me view and browse the full repo exactly as if the full repo where checked out, but when I open a directory or file the contents are downloaded on-demand.

[0]: https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/contrib/scalar

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/git/blob/vfs-2.37.0/Documentati...

Ironically, Microsoft has been a major contributor to improvements in git for handling large repos after Windows was migrated to git.

https://github.com/microsoft/git

300GB git repo... anyway, good to see there's work for merge in back to git proper, though it seems like that is still a work in progress (maybe) as https://github.com/Microsoft/git/ still seems pretty active.

This is well written and deserves my upvote, because sparse-checkout is part of git and knowing how it works is useful.

That said, there's absolutely no reason to structure your code in a monorepo.

Here's what I think GitHub is doing:

1) Encourage monorepo adoption

2) Build tooling for monorepos

3) Selling tooling to developers stranded in monorepos

Microsoft, which owns GitHub, created the microsoft/git fork linked in the article, and they explain their justification here: https://github.com/microsoft/git#why-is-this-fork-needed

> Well, because Git is a distributed version control system, each Git repository has a copy of all files in the entire history. As large repositories, aka monorepos grow, Git can struggle to manage all that data. As Git commands like status and fetch get slower, developers stop waiting and start switching context. And context switches harm developer productivity.

I believe that Google's brand is so big that it led to this mass cognitive dissonance, which is being exploited by GitHub.

To be clear, here are the two ideas in conflict:

* Git is decentralized and fast, and Google famously doesn't use it.

* Companies want to use "industry standard" tech, and Google is the standard for success.

Now apply those observations to a world where your engineers only use "git".

The result is market demand to misuse git for monorepos, which Microsoft is pouring huge amounts of resources into enabling via GitHub.

It makes great sense that GitHub wants to lean into this. More centralization and being more reliant on GitHub's custom tooling is obviously better for GitHub.

It just so happens that GitHub is building tools to enable monorepos, essentially normalizing their usage.

Then GitHub can sell tools to deal with your enormous monorepo, because your traditional tools will feel slow and worse than GitHub's tools.

In other words, GitHub is propping up the failed monorepo idea as a strategy to get people in the pipeline for things like CodeSpaces: https://github.com/features/codespaces

Because if you have 100 projects and they're all separate, you can do development locally for each and it's fast and sensible. But if all your projects are in one repo, the tools grind to a halt, and suddenly you need to buy a solution that just works to meet your business goals.

VFS for Git was superceded by https://github.com/microsoft/scalar and then many of the features were merged into mainline git, so what is left now is a thin shell around git features in the form of MS's forked git binary: https://github.com/microsoft/git