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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

I think once you're checked out, you're still distributed as far as being able to make and push commits which modify the files you have. But obviously someone can't clone files from you which you don't yourself have.

See previous articles which discussions:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2017/02/03/announcin...

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large...

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From reading the first post "The largest Git repo on the planet" - "Windows code base" of "3.5M files", "repo of about 300GB", "4,000 engineers" - I assumed that "Windows code base" contains all the utilties, DLLs that included in windows release such as notepad, games, IE/Edge etc and not just the Windows KERNEL.

If so, the comparable code base to check against is Android AOSP, Ubuntu, RedHat or FreeBSD.

If that is true, I believe the source code base for Ubuntu/RedHat distribution with all the Apps likely be bigger compare to Windows in term of number files, source repo and number of engineers (open source developers for all the packages such as ff, chrome openoffice.)

Microsoft folks feel free to correct me here.

It seems that the existing git's process, dev model seems to work well for much bigger projects already by using different git repo for each apps.

Still not sure what pain point does the new GVFS solve.....

AOSP is probably the closest comparison, Fedora/RHEL and Ubuntu don't keep application source code checked into git. Fedora specifically uses dist-git, there's a git repo per package with the spec file, patches and other files needed for the build and then source tarballs are pushed to a web server where they can be downloaded later with the dist-git tooling.

So yeah, all of the code and data actually stored in source control for various Linux distributions is pretty small.

Linux distributions are a different beast since they're mostly tracking a myriad of upstream third-party repositories overlaid when necessary by their own patch sets. And most of those upstream repos are by necessity highly decoupled from any particular distribution. Different distributions have different solutions to how they manage upstreams with local changes. E.g. OpenEmbedded uses BitBake where (similar to FreeBSD Ports and Gentoo Portage) the upstream can be pretty much anything, including just a tarball over HTTP, and local changes are captured in patch files, while others instead use one-to-one tracking repos where local changes are represented by version control revisions.

AOSP is closer to what you're imagining, but I haven't met anyone who thinks Repo (Android's meta-repo layer) and Gerrit (their Repo-aware code review and merge queue tool) are pleasant to work with. E.g. it takes forever and a day to do a Repo sync on a fresh machine. A demand-synced VFS would be very nice for AOSP development, even though it's not a monorepo but a polyrepo where Repo ties everything together.

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