oxen-release VS git

We've been working on a data version control system called "oxen" optimized for large unstructured datasets that we are seeing more and more with the advent of many of the generative AI techniques.

Many of these datasets have many many images, videos, audio files, text as well as structured tabular datasets that git or git-lfs just falls flat on.

Would love anyone to kick the tires on it and let us know what you think:

https://github.com/Oxen-AI/oxen-release

The commands are mirrored after git so it is easy to learn, but optimized under the hood for larger datasets.

Super cool! Would love to see an integration with Oxen and their data version control https://github.com/Oxen-AI/oxen-release

We have been working on a data version control tool called Oxen that is tackling many of your needs. Feel free to check it out here:

https://github.com/Oxen-AI/oxen-release#-oxen

Going down your list of requirements, Oxen has:

* Data versioning, similar paradigm to git, but built from the ground up for large ML datasets

We've been working on some open source tooling called "oxen" that was built for large datasets of images, video, audio, text etc. We wanted to solve the exact problem you're flagging here with git.

Feel free to check it out here https://github.com/Oxen-AI/oxen-release#-oxen would love any feedback!

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