LIlifeisstillgood·Apr 2, 2024Submission
GitHub – josh-project/josh: Just One Single History
1 points · Open discussionjosh-project
josh
Rust2021–2024
josh-project / josh
josh
Git at scale platform
16Distinct people
21Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Git at scale platform
GitHub
Where it is used
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What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year21 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-02-17 16:44:20 UTC to 2024-04-02 12:51:11 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 3 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 1 | 9 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 2 | 4 |
What Hacker News says
21 sourcesWhy 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.
In Debian Git MonorepoRepo link: https://github.com/josh-project/josh
In Josh: Just One Single HistoryScalar 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 third 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, including the Scalar daemon which does background monitoring and optimization. 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 with Git's existing solutions that aren't ideal; for example Git's partial clones are great but IIRC can only be used as a "cone" appl
Read the rest
ied to the original filesystem hierarchy. More generalized designs would allow mapping arbitrary paths in the original repository to any other path in the virtual checkout, and synchronizing between them. Tools like Josh can do this today with existing Git repositories[1].
The Git for Windows that was referenced isn't even that big at 300GB, either. That's well within the realm of single machine stuff. 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...
ACLs are in the works https://github.com/josh-project/josh/pull/561
That being said, the overall scope of permissions and authentication is more complicated, more improvements is definitely needed
In How Kubernetes Broke GitWith regard to repo composition, I have been following this project: https://github.com/josh-project/josh
In What comes after GitI haven't had a chance to try it at scale yet, but I've been looking at josh (Just One Single History):
https://github.com/josh-project/josh
which goes at more-or-less the same problem from the other direction. Josh helps with treating a monorepo as separate repos, as opposed to git x-modules' approach of treating separate repos as one repo. Either way, the idea is to try and get the benefits of both monorepo and multi-repo styles, while avoiding/mitigating the disadvantages.
HN talked about it 11 months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27844363
Anyone have experience/updates to share since then, or a comparison with git x-modules?
In Show HN: Get rid of Git submodules and never look back (now for GitHub users)Also check out josh: https://github.com/josh-project/josh
In EdenYou don't even need to make a skeleton repo first. By passing `-o merge` as extra option on the push to a non existing view, the merging of unrelated histories will be done by the server. See:
https://github.com/josh-project/josh/issues/596
In Advantages of Monorepos (2015)I've not used it extensively, but Josh can probably help here.
https://github.com/josh-project/josh
It's designed for making multiple Git repos from a monorepo, but I think you should be able to make a skeleton repo that represents your desired final monorepo layout and push your individual repos to the Josh subviews of that repo to combine them all.
(A big advantage of this approach over the multiple unrelated histories is that you don't have the mass move commits since Josh will rewrite all history as if the files were always in that folder, so you don't have to worry about history of individual files getting broken.)
In Advantages of Monorepos (2015)There are several ways to do this. Having extensively experimented with all of them I can say that the best are josh[0] (if you need external history continuity) and git subtree[1] (if you just need the commits to remain valid within your repository).
[0]: https://github.com/josh-project/josh
[1]: https://manpages.debian.org/testing/git-man/git-subtree.1.en...
In Everything you need to know about monoreposShowing the 15 most recent of 21 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.