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xoofx / zio

A cross-platform abstract/virtual filesystem framework with many built-ins filesystems for .NET
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
817 stars 61 forks source link

Regarding a Git file system #3

Closed Jjagg closed 7 years ago

Jjagg commented 7 years ago

Hey @xoofx! When you wrote you'd like to "Add support for Git FileSystem (readonly)", did you mean mounting a remote without fetching all files? I looked into this a bit and it seems that's not very straightforward with Git. For one there is no way to get the directory tree from a remote without fetching the actual files. It's also not possible to fetch specific files from a remote. So I don't think a VFS for Git that lazily fetches files can be implemented. At least not for Git directly.

Microsoft recently open-sourced Git Virtual FileSystem (GVFS) which relies on additional operations - specified by their GVFS protocol - for its implementation. If the big Git services were to implement that protocol, implementing a VFS based on that is probably the best course of action.

Of course a VFS could also be implemented specifically for GitHub or any other service with a public API that supports the required operations. Short term, this is what I'd go for (I'm only interested in GitHub at this point).

xoofx commented 7 years ago

The idea is to provide local git filesystem only, mainly to access the folders/files of a repository for a particular commit without having to check-out.

Currently, I don't have plans for anything related to remote providers. As you may have noticed, Zio doesn't provide an async API. The primary reason is that providing an API over remote/breakable connection requires a lot more extra care (like async, cancellation tokens...etc.) and could shape the API quite differently... and that would complicate usages for just plain local scenarios.

Jjagg commented 7 years ago

Thanks for that clarification! I'll close this since it's not relevant for the local Git FS you have in mind.