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Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

To be clear on what this is, it allows you to mount a git repo and use writes to the filesystem to autocommit and push to the remote, effectively using git and a server to synchronize directories between remote hosts.

That is not the same thing I would think of as a version-controlled filesystem. That would be something more like the ClearCase MultiVersion Filesystem, which allows you to define versioned views of an entire filesystem. This gives you the holy grail of versioning, snapshotting, backup, restore, synchronizing entire systems, with equal treatment of text and binary files, in a way that is totally transparent to any higher-level tooling that reads and writes to these files, that developers have been trying to reinvent for 30 years because ClearCase is proprietary and very expensive.

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I've done something that sounds similar with bash scripts and systemd path units. Every time I modify a configuration file from any of a number of paths I'm interested in versioning, I get a prompt to supply an optional commit message, and the change is automatically committed and pushed to remote. It's not the whole file system, but the commit messages on configuration file changes have come in handy at least once.

I expected it to be closer to Microsoft's GVFS: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/announcing-gvfs-git-vi...

There, they used a filesystem interface to speed up checkouts for large repositories.

Since mvfs is a Linux kernel driver, it must be free software. Here is a git mirror of it: https://github.com/msteinert/mvfs

I'm not sure how easy it is to use with anything that isn't the rest of the clearcase suite

ClearCase is the devil in software form!

Unintuitive, hard to maintain, absolutely unloved in industry, extremely expensive.

I hear Opportunity knocking...

I used ClearCase for many years. It was a good version control system. It had a certain amount of complexity associated with it, but I thought it was fine and worked well.

I assume it’s still sold and supported, but I haven’t checked on it in ten years.

I used it in a global telecoms company about 15 years or so. We had all the bells and whistles dynamic snapshots FS integration etc and I found the experience very underwhelming. Clunky and brittle and it never felt fully transparent and for all that we had to do a whole heap of training to learn to use it anyway. Subversion when I came to it was a step up, but still felt a little brittle and they kept on changing things between releases. For all its warts git is simply the best tool in common use. Fast, reliable and probably about as hard to learn as any of the other options if you’re just sticking to the basic usecases.

Performance tends to be very poor. Seems very much in "cash cow" mode as in not being invested in to improve.

Similar to making a ZFS snapshot, maybe?

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