Re: what's the current wisdom on git over NFS/CIFS?

Sitaram Chamarty schrieb:

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 2:28 AM, Linus
Torvalds[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Btw, I think we fixed the problem we had with CIFS. That one was a cifs
filesystem problem on Linux, but it should be fixed in 2.6.30+ (commit
0f4d634c: "cifs: flush data on any setattr"). If you have an older kernel
(or are just uncertain), you can also work around it with

       [core]
               fsyncobjectfiles = true

which may be a good thing in general (regardless of any cifs issues), but
in most cases the performance loss isn't worth it if your filesystem is
stable and sane.

Though I asked this following from a debate on IRC, it now looks as if
this will solve another of my problems too.

Let me explain.

I'm evangelising git at work, and although most projects are happy,
even eager to setup a proper server for git, and those that can't are
happy to just use mine, there are a couple of projects that are almost
exclusively Windows _and_ cannot add another machine _and_ have client
confidentiality issues so they can't just use my server.

I don't exactly understand why your reply with this Windows story to the
fsyncobjectfiles paragraph. But if you think that fsyncobjectfiles+msysgit
is your killer argument, then you think wrong: fsyncobjectfiles is ignored
in msysgit. (We don't yet have an implementation of fsync() :-( )

The issue that Linus mentioned happened when a Linux client operates in a
repository that lives on a CIFS mount.

My alternatives for them so far were (1) VirtualBox running Fedora or
something within one of their beefier Windows servers or (2) the whole
cygwin install, which is painful compared to msysgit.

Sounds like we can just do it with traditional Windows fileshares, as
long as we make sure no one does a "git gc" on the bare repo that is
being shared.  That's a very small price to pay!

It will work with the caveat you mention. I have such a setup myself.

-- Hannes