git

Microsoft uses monorepos, and you have access to Microsoft's tools! They chose to work with Git and amend it when necessary, just like Meta did with Mercurial. A few years ago they had a Virtual File System extension for Git. Now it's a public fork of Git that is intended for large repositories (several hundreds of GB). It adds a `git scalar` command, see https://github.com/microsoft/git/blob/HEAD/contrib/scalar/do...

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] using git partial-clone among other features. 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...

This has been superceded by Scalar (https://github.com/microsoft/scalar) and again merged into Microsoft's fork of git (https://github.com/microsoft/git) It supports neat stuff like partial clone which seems like a pretty big deal.

This is awesome. Especially the fact that it's built-in and easy to turn on. Seams like quite a complex solution though. I guess some big company (Microsoft?) implemented it internally for their own use and later tried to move it to upstream git. I wonder if there was some pushback from git maintainers from having this functionality built-in. Also why for Windows they use named pipes when in theory Windows also supports it? (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/af_unix-comes-to-...) BTW, to the author of this article. It is very good. It was an interesting read. The are some small issues: - "markdown" link didn't get converted to html: "[core.untrackedcache](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config...)" - the link to "philosophy" of Scalar doesn't work: https://github.com/microsoft/git/blob/HEAD/contrib/scalar/do

First it was https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit then replaced with https://github.com/microsoft/scalar and then into their git fork https://github.com/microsoft/git

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.