Julia Evans
has anyone made a read-only FUSE filesystem for a git repository where every commit is a folder and the folder contains all the files in that commit?
the idea is that you could just run `cd COMMIT_ID` and poke around instead of checking out the commit
and maybe the branches could be symbolic links to the commit folders?
藤井太洋, Taiyo Fujii
@b0rk Noy git, but the Apple Time Machine introduces the similar interface. Daily/hourly snapshots are in the folders (directory slink).
It's good to watching around. And if git serves so, more non-tech people would use git.
json web tokin'
@b0rk people are so joyless on this internet
Julia Evans
guys this is such a fun idea I cannot believe people are in the replies trying to explain to me why they think it is impractical
the whole point of computers is to do impractical things and see what happens
Paul Cantrell
@b0rk
A FUSE filesystem where every folder is a playful idea and its contents are all of the joyless rebuttal replies
feld
Zeyi (Rice) Fan 🍙
(former member on the team built EdenFS).
I actually wrote the exact thing you described as a practice to familiarize myself with FUSE API:
Julia Evans
@wez ooh cool thank you!
Wez Furlong :terminal:
@b0rk the EdenFS portion of Sapling (https://github.com/facebook/sapling/) has the guts of this inside. Even though that project was built primarily for Sapling (an evolution of Mercurial), it can also mount Git repos. We talked about exposing literally the interface your described for some internal infrastructure in the early days. I'm no longer part of that team so I'm not sure if that ever got implemented, but it wouldn't be difficult if someone was motivated!
Julia Evans
the main reason I've found this "all your git commits are folders" feature to be useful is for searching past code: I can run `grep someFunction branch_histories/main/*/commit.go` to find the old version of someFunction I deleted. There are other ways to do that in git but this is easier.
or if I want to just quickly look at a file on another branch to copy a line from it, I can run `vim branches/other-branch/go.mod`
curious about other use cases
Julia Evans
ok I got extremely nerd sniped and made my own version of this “filesystem where every git commit is a folder" thing https://github.com/jvns/git-commit-folders
I wrote a FUSE version and an NFS version that I think will be easier for mac users to use. it definitely does not work on windows.
it probably has about 5 million bugs but it seems to kind of work
Julia Evans
seems like the answer is yes!
- https://github.com/fanzeyi/giblefs (fuse implementation in rust where every commit is a folder)
- https://orib.dev/git9.html (for plan 9)
would love to hear about any others
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