Comment by nothrabannosir
7 years ago
> Git is fundamentally better than most of the alternatives
No way. Only if you define “good” as “good at the kind of project that git is good at,” where it will hold vacuously.
I suffer daily through the cyst that is git LFS, and it’s a joke. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. I hear that it’s not doing any better in large scale mono repo land. Google doesn’t use it, afaik. Microsoft does (but multi repo, last I heard), Facebook doesn’t (custom Mercurial, some tasty quotes at [0]). Not a glowing “fundamentally better”, exactly.
[0] https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...
That's a fair criticism for sure, git makes tradeoffs that fall apart with large repos. You can, however, go a whole career without those things being a problem. Most code repositories are simply not that big.
And you can go a whole career without needing the extra staging features that git has and some other systems like mercurial don't. The ui gets a lot easier without that and for many developers that is probably the best trade off.
1. Git LFS is not part of Git. It's an unofficial extension, despite the name. I've got my own qualms about Git, but that's like complaining about GitHub's forking model as a reason Git is bad.
2. Microsoft uses Git in single large-scale mono repo form, for - believe it or not - Windows. It clocks in at about 3.5 million files, and a full clone weighs in at 300GB:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large...
Microsoft uses Git in single large-scale mono repo form
They had to change git itself to be able to do that. So no, the article itself shows it was not ready for that big a repository.
Git LFS is not part of Git.
That’s my point: without LFS it’s even worse to work with large files. If LFS is the best option you have, forget it. That’s an entire area of projects (anything with assets) you can’t use Git for.
I believe MS has most of windows in a git mono-repo now, enabled by a custom git-supporting filesystem they've developed:
https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS
Pretty cool stuff. Doesn't seem to address the large-files case so much as the many-files case, though. I would love better git support for large files.