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Comment by neerajsi | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit? It's used by the Windows team to manage a monorepo containing most Windows source code.

Unfortunately that approach was put in maintenance mode since it didn't seem like it would be supportable on macOS.

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This has been superceded by Scalar (https://github.com/microsoft/scalar) and again merged into Microsoft's fork of git (https://github.com/microsoft/git)

It supports neat stuff like partial clone which seems like a pretty big deal.

Interesting! It seems some of Scalar from late 2021 has already made it into the official git project's contrib dir [0]. It looks like Scalar is mostly an opinionated way to configure git [1] using git partial-clone among other features.

Git partial-clone looks almost perfect, except it only downloads and displays files explicitly added to the git sparse-checkout list. I want some "magic" vfs shenanigans that lets me view and browse the full repo exactly as if the full repo where checked out, but when I open a directory or file the contents are downloaded on-demand.

[0]: https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/contrib/scalar

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/git/blob/vfs-2.37.0/Documentati...

It seems win32 has specific support for this kind of tech at a couple different layers, one that's low level filesystem virtualization that's like FUSE I guess [1], and another that's higher level and exposes sync status of files via explorer and other win32 apis [2] which is what I assume OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc use.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/projfs/projec...

[2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/cfapi/build-a...

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