forge VS josh

you can clone, browse, modify, fork, make pull requests from Magit without leaving Emacs a single time. checkout https://github.com/magit/forge

However, i'm still unable to create issues or pull requests from within forge, returning error in process filter: Failed to submit post: (error http 404 ((message . "Not Found") (documentation_url . "https://developer.github.com/v3/pulls/#create-a-pull-request"))). Do you know how to solve this as well? I've tried looking around for resources, and so far have only come across issue #273 on magit/forge repo, which was resolved using the correct token permissions. My token was set up with the repo, user, and read:org permissions as per the documentation, but am facing the same issue. I have also run (setq url-debug t) for more verbose debugging, but I'm not seeing any additional help either.

You can also manage via a holistic UI: - Bisection - Log and reflog, stashes - subtrees, submodules - certain third party subcommands like git-absorb, and extend it with your own - interact with issues and pull requests via forge - pretty much all of the hundreds of CLI flags via a modal UI that got generalized and extracted to a lib called transient - well-integrated diff and conflict resolution (which is mostly just smerge) - the rebase/cherry-pick workflows I liked the best, including support for --update-refs - at any time you can always press a key to see the raw commands and output that it's using, which taught me a ton of corner cases - IMO it has a great manual

Following up here with a feature request, in case anyone else reading this is interested: https://github.com/magit/forge/discussions/580

Yes :). Basically all you need to be able to fork and pull request is the Forge package. It's made from the author of Magit: https://github.com/magit/forge Just follow the manual, you basically need to create a token on GitHub and share it with Forge through your authinfo. I tested it recently (cloned, forked, made changes, committed, pushed and pull request to original repo) and I didn't have to open Firefox even once. https://magit.vc/manual/forge/

how is it different from forge?

orgit package, which provides Org link types pointing to Magit buffers (including log and revision buffers). Optionally, magit/forge and orgit-forge packages might be useful too, for noting issues and pull requests.

Not projectile-specific, but see browse-at-remote and forge (of interest are forge-browse-* commands).

There is also https://github.com/magit/forge, which I haven't looked at. Instead, I do all the proprietary github things through their proprietary website.

For magit users, there's https://github.com/magit/forge - ultimately the store of record is still centralized as it's GitHub/GitLab/etc., but it does integrate a local copy of it nicely with your other git operations.

Why use submodules when you can properly vendor the upstream git, and export/import commits without breaking hashes on either side?

https://github.com/josh-project/josh

We've been using josh at TVL for years and it's just amazing.

Scalar explicitly does not implement the virtualized filesystem the OP is referring to. The original Git VFS for Windows that Microsoft designed did in fact do this, but as your second link notes, Microsoft abandoned that in favor of Scalar's totally different design which explicitly was about scaling repositories without filesystem virtualization.

There's a bunch of related features they added to Git to achieve scalability without virtualization. Those are all useful and Scalar is a welcome addition. But the need for a virtual filesystem layer for large-scale repositories is still a very real one. There are also some limitations that aren't ideal; for example Git's partial clones IIRC can only be used as a "cone" applied to the original filesystem hierarchy. More generalized designs would allow mapping any arbitrary paths in the original repository to any other path in the virtual checkout. Tools like Josh can do this today with existing Git repositories[1]. That helps you get even sparser and smaller checkouts.

The Git for Windows that was referenced isn't even that big at 300GB, by the way. Game studios regularly have repositories that exist at multi-terabyte size, and they have also converged on similar virtualization solutions. For example, Destiny 2 uses a "virtual file synchronization" layer called VirtualSync[2] that reduced the working size of their checkouts by over 98%, multiple terabytes of savings per person. And in a twist of fate, VirtualSync was implemented thanks to a feature called "ProjFS" that Microsoft added to Windows... which was motivated originally by the Git VFS for Windows they abandoned!

[1] https://github.com/josh-project/josh

[2] https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1027699/Virtual-Sync-Terabytes...

Good overview, I know these sorts of pains well. Lots of hard questions and few definitive wins/right answers. How to organize a massive repository out in the open is still an open question. On that note, recently, I've been experimenting with this project called josh, which basically is like 'git subtree on extreme steroids, functioning as a git proxy':

https://josh-project.github.io/josh/

It basically lets you unify/view many repositories as a single one, or equivalent to split a mono-repo into smaller sized units of work for CI, specific teams, etc. It's bidirectional, so you push and pull from josh and everything goes into a single linear history in the mono repo. And because it's bidirectional, people in the mono-repo can still do things like make large-scale atomic changes across all sub-repositories, and those get reflected.

Josh currently isn't suitable for a lot of workloads due to various reasons (authentication is one that stands out), but it's actually the first tool I have seen that manages to offer BitKeeper-like "subtrees" that work really well, at scale, for large repos and teams. It requires some care to make sure "sub-trees" can be usable units of work, but it was one of the best features of BK in my opinion and really great for people doing one-off contributions, or isolating trees/changes to specific developers.

I'd be interested to know if there are other open alternatives to this. It's a nice point in the design space between solutions like "integrate with the filesystem layer to do sparse clones" or "just split up the repos."

With regard to repo composition, I have been following this project: https://github.com/josh-project/josh