mozsearch VS VFSForGit

- code browsing is primitive compared to https://searchfox.org/ (but most code browsing tool are, in comparison)

- my notifications are completely flooded by lots of useless information on GitHub, but that might be fixable

- our CI system (treeherder/taskcluster) scales, works on Linux/Mac/windows/Android and a bunch of version and arch, integrated with all of the other tools mentioned. Things such as auto-running tests based on the content of the patch, automatic categorization and prioritization of intermittent test failures, or auto-recording test failures and offering a pernosco recording showing the issue are just some of the features that we use daily without even thinking

All the time. I would say at least 50% of my code browsing is done from my phone. I make heavily use of the mobile GitHub web interface for this (find-references support has been a godsend, search is still meh, I hate how they keep breaking basic find-in-page with SPA jank). Also Searchfox [0] when I need to comb through Firefox code (fast, excellent, no complaints).

Context: grad student, programming languages and systems research plus a bunch of IoT hacking on my own time. Either elder Gen Z or youngest possible Millennial, depending where you put the cutoff.

[0] https://searchfox.org

[4] is not really a usable 'product'. Livegrep (https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep) was inspired by it and is very usable.

[3] used to be a Google open source project as well, but it fell out of maintenance, and Sourcegraph took it over. It powers most of the basic regex/literal search in Sourcegraph.

Mozilla's code is searchable in Searchfox (https://searchfox.org/) which uses the indexer from Livegrep, combined with their own Git indexer and language-specific cross reference databases.

OpenGrok (https://github.com/oracle/opengrok) is also rather well known, but I have found it to have a slightly worse UI than alternatives.

Try using Searchfox to find references to those libraries. When you open a result, hover your mouse over the left column to see what commit added each line.

You might want to lokk at this, and this, and this .

Layout is hella broken, obviously, but it doesn't crash. You can do a search for progresschunck at https://searchfox.org to find what it means.

https://searchfox.org/ should be you go-to tool to search Firefox code-base.

Also, you can use browser toolbox to inspect Firefox UI and see what styles are being applied to it and to figure out what selectors to use. Of course, there is also https://searchfox.org/ for when you need to figure out exactly how Firefox is doing some feature x.

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.