GoKawiilHello! The other day, I started wondering – has anyone ever made a FUSE filesystem for a git repository where all every commit is a folder? It turns out the answer is yes! There’s giblefs, GitMounter, and git9 for Plan 9.
But FUSE is pretty annoying to use on Mac – you need to install a kernel extension, and Mac OS seems to be making it harder and harder to install kernel extensions for security reasons. Also I had a few ideas for how to organize the filesystem differently than those projects.
So I thought it would be fun to experiment with ways to mount filesystems on Mac OS other than FUSE, so I built a project that does that called git-commit-folders. It works (at least on my computer) with both FUSE and NFS, and there’s a broken WebDav implementation too.
It’s pretty experimental (I’m not sure if this is actually a useful piece of software to have or just a fun toy to think about how git works) but it was fun to write and I’ve enjoyed using it myself on small repositories so here are some of the problems I ran into while writing it.
The main reason I wanted to make this was to give folks some intuition for how git works under the hood. After all, git commits really are very similar to folders – every Git commit contains a directory listing of the files in it, and that directory can have subdirectories, etc.
It’s just that git commits aren’t actually implemented as folders to save disk space.
So in git-commit-folders , every commit is actually a folder, and if you want to explore your old commits, you can do it just by exploring the filesystem! For example, if I look at the initial commit for my blog, it looks like this:
$ ls commits/8d/8dc0/8dc0cb0b4b0de3c6f40674198cb2bd44aeee9b86/ README
and a few commits later, it looks like this:
$ ls /tmp/git-homepage/commits/c9/c94e/c94e6f531d02e658d96a3b6255bbf424367765e9/ _config.yml config.rb Rakefile rubypants.rb source
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