Interesting tidbit:
> The developers making Microsoft Windows use Git
> The developers making Microsoft Windows use Git
Also, even after learning a fair amount of git, I still find I spend a noticeable amount of time dealing with it. I don't remember spending a lot of time on any of the VCS systems I've used in the past. They just stayed out of my way and let do my thing.
To answer your question though - Microsoft has a lot of git extensions that they are slowly submitting upstream. Hence git is usable for their megarepo.
Look up GVFS on GitHub, very cool work.
Same for Twitter (they are not submitting upstream though as far as I know)
Similar for fb/mercurial
Prime example: the git staging area/cache/index needs to die. Git would be half as difficult to use with fewer code shredding surprises. This abomination is a prime example of badly exposed internal structure. Everything feature that is crammed into this whatever-the-hell-that-is could be replaced by a vastly superior solution which does not require anything like it.
Says who? Branches and commits are cheap, it's how we can undo ourselves and freely experiment.
I agree that untested commits into a publishing/release branch shouldn't exist: all commits there should be merges from dev branches, but to say every commit should be tested is utter bollocks and denies us the advantages of cheap branching and commits.
Either they need to be squash+merge or the dev branches need to end up with working commits before the merge. Otherwise your life will become hell the first time you need to bisect.
Microsoft works around several of the issues there by using GVFS. Also, at Microsoft scale, everything "sort of sucks", there's just no silver bullets. You take one of the least bad options and put all the effort you can towards making it work as well as you can.
At "Microsoft scale," you have the resources to purpose build anything you need from scratch for any scale you're working at... therefore if anything "sort of sucks" it's because:
a) It's not worth the money/resources. (The "let it suck" approach)
or
b) Nobody cares (The "acceptance that we suck, at 'scale'" approach)
There's a fair bit of excitement around the new, exciting, open source friendly Microsoft with built-in Linux kernel emulation, an embrace of git and a huge release of open source tools...
Honestly though, I'm not buying it, the issue I've had with Microsoft over the years doesn't just stem from the shitty software or aggressive business practices... it's the deep rooted culture of mediocrity it promotes.
People who belong to that church believe it's ok to build shitty software because doing it right is too hard. Why root-cause an issue when you can just script reboots? It's too hard anyway, we're at "Microsoft scale."
The rise of the internet and the companies that grew around it showed us that if you have a culture of giving a shit, you can build really complex things "at scale" that aren't complete shit.
I worry that the new Microsoft will be a different kind of trojan horse for the OSS world. It won't be "embrace, extend, extinguish" it will be more like a social media psyops campaign that beats it into everyone's heads that now we're at "Microsoft scale" it's ok for everything to "kinda suck", and if we're not careful... everything will.
But it was specifically designed for the Linux kernel.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/building-windows-4-m...