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Microsoft Programming

Microsoft Addresses Pressure From Developer Community, Promises To Rename GVFS 158

Posted by msmash from the backtrack dept.
DuroSoft writes: Earlier this week an article ran about how Microsoft's multi-year refusal to rename its terabyte-scale Git extension "GVFS" (Git Virtual File System) had drawn the ire and dismay of the GNOME GVfs project (Gnome Virtual File System) which predates the Microsoft project by years. Thanks to Slashdot coverage and community pressure, Microsoft has now officially promised to rename GVFS to something else, and is asking the community for suggestions for a new name. Is this an official sign that MIcrosoft is finally listening to developers (albeit with a Slashdot-level of negative attention), or are they simply trying to appease the crowd while they are still in the news due to their acquisition of GitHub?
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Microsoft Addresses Pressure From Developer Community, Promises To Rename GVFS More

Microsoft Addresses Pressure From Developer Community, Promises To Rename GVFS

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  • Gitty McGitFS (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @10:44AM (#56736702)

    Subject line says it all.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Barny ( 103770 )

      Damn it, I was coming in here to say this. Bravo, anon, bravo.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Here's something the people in power need to realize, in my opinion...

      Why do people vote for such inane names like, "Boaty McBoatFace" or the man of the year, "Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf"?

      The collective people really don't generally want to be "stuck" with those names that they voted for, but rather, it's a test - is the voting system fair? Can the organization be trusted to honor the votes of the people? Overwhelmingly, the answer is No. These names get voted in because there is no trust that the re

      • GittyMcGitFace is clearly the winner. Why is this even a discussion?

        • Reminds me a bit when I once worked for a power company in a scrum team. When the team got to big and was split the people demanded to have names for the teams. So we ended up with team names like "People's Front of Judea" and "Judean People's Front" (not to be confused with the People's Front of Judea).

          See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          I actually never knew in which team I belonged ...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jiro ( 131519 )

        If I invite you to a party and tell you to get some ice from the freezer, I probably don't expect you to put twenty pounds of ice into a plastic bag and take it home with you. But what I said doesn't literally rule it out.

        Proper social skills require understanding implication and context, not just understanding people's literal words. If they say "you can name it anything" and you pick a name like "Boaty McBoatFace" you've literally followed their words (they did say anything), but you've ignored the soci

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kremmy ( 793693 )
          I would argue that GittyMcGitFS, because it is like "Boaty McBoatFace", meets the criteria. That you are denying the greater context to make an argument about context.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rastos1 ( 601318 )

        These names get voted in because there is no trust that the results will be honored.

        The fact that we do have "Boaty McBoatface" contradicts the claim that the results are not honored. But perhaps it's just an exception that proves the rule.

        I wonder whether SpaceX drone ships names are a result of a vote (even if perhaps not a public vote)

        Fun fact: There is a bridge in capital of Slovakia for which there was a popular vote. The winning name was "Chuck Norris Bridge". The vote was rejected, but Google Maps c

    • I would have FS4DDD File System For Developers, Developers, Developers...

      Or perhaps BFS Blamer File System.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Taking suggestions? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sqorbit ( 3387991 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @10:44AM (#56736704)
    That always works out well.. File McFileyFace? Gitty McGit Face?

  • I know what it'll be (Score:5, Funny)

    by ausekilis ( 1513635 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @10:46AM (#56736730)

    Extended - Cross-platform Terabyte-enabled Filesystem, version 4.
    Or Ext4-FS, for short.

  • Slashdot doesn't have enough readers to cause a website to get slashdotted. I'm curious as to how Slashdot coverage could influence Microsoft to change anything.

  • Sorry, this is Microsoft we're talking about, amiright?

  • In British english its pejorative term similar to bastard. Linus obviously didn't do his homework before christening it.

  • Or.... (Score:2)

    by Zorro ( 15797 )

    They could adopt the file system and publish any improvements publicly for free use.

    But no. This is the same old Microsoft.

  • We have decided to call it I can't believe it's not GVFS!

    They expect that the angry hordes outside the Redmond walls to be carrying torches and pitchforks. The fact that it seemed to be a mixed bag is normally typical for the area. That they were all sporting aprons threw the riot squad off for an instant, until the crowd control tanks rolled in with their sonic cannons.

  • .VFS4G but that assumes this will only ever be used for GIT, which is probably a bad way to name something. .GIFTS (GIT/FS) .VITFS (Virtual IT File System) .GIT, .VIT .GIVFS (GIt Virtual File System)

    • Git Version Control File System

      • Git Version Control File System

        Make it less git-specific. VCFS - Version Control File System.

        Imagine a file-system-centric-way to talk to git, Subversion, Mercurial, pretty much any VCS without caring (much*) what the semantics of the underlying VCS are.

        * there are system-specific limitations, e.g. you can easily mount deeply into svn but not so much into git without a complex emulation.

  • Thanks to Slashdot coverage? (Score:3)

    by Eloking ( 877834 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @11:14AM (#56736910)

    Thanks to Slashdot coverage and community pressure, Microsoft has now officially promised to rename GVFS to something else,

    Really? Isn't this a little...arrogant to take the credit about MS change of mind?

    • M$VFS

      Ha, my first thought was, just call it GitVFS, and then I saw they had some guidelines in TFA for suggestions, the first of which was they weren't going to put 'Git' in it, the second of which

      Short and welcoming - It has to be a nice welcoming word in most languages (sorry – while PoopVFS might elicit a giggle, it won't make the cut when I go to meetings with the Windows team with that in my slide deck. Also it needs to not contain special characters so M$FT is a no go as well

  • --- Is this an official sign that MIcrosoft is finally listening to developers (albeit with a Slashdot-level of negative attention), or are they simply trying to appease the crowd while they are still in the news due to their acquisition of GitHub? ---

    .
    Definitely the latter.

    Microsoft said they should be judged by developers based upon how they acted "in recent years." Well in recent years, Microsoft behaved exactly like the old "embrace, extend, extinguish" Microsoft of olde by (1) naming a product wi

  • WMD-FS (Score:4, Funny)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @11:41AM (#56737046)
    Where's My Data File System

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Or Weapon of Massive Destruction-File System!

      Or DWMD-FS = Dude, Where's My Data File-System?

  • What a truly shitty company MS still remain.

    For years they poison the namespace for a piece of free software (I wonder why?) and then only relent when they decide they need the developers & users of said software onside....after pissing away $7.5 billion in an effort to coral them.

    Their complete lack of clue knows no bounds. Let me have a guess, I'm not the only one to have dumped Github in the past few days & they're getting a bit nervous?

    The funniest thing about it is that before git came a

    • Uh, no... Microsoft used an internal version of Perforce called Source Depot for version control prior to the switch to git.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Their complete lack of clue is making them being worth more than Alphabet (Google) now. Truly an example of incompetence.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by dddux ( 3656447 )
        I will threaten the bar owner at the corner with a gun to sell only my beer at the bar, so people will have no choice but to buy my beer, no matter the quality of it. Does that make me competent?

  • Virtual Git File System

    A quick Google search didn't reveal anything in tech with that acronym.

  • MS says: "LOL we plan on owning GNOME and everything else in the future anyway, so sure we'll rename it because we'll be renaming everything later anyway"
  • GitVFS. Why make it difficult?

    • GitVFS. Why make it difficult?

      Well, it looks like that's what I get for not reading TFA

      No Git - As discussed, we don’t want it to be GitName or things like that – we don’t want to mess with Git’s name and the fact that it is vendor agnostic.

      • ...we don’t want to mess with Git’s name and the fact that it is vendor agnostic.

        This is directed at MS, not you chispito: and yet the "G" in the current acronym is "Git". How vendor agnostic is it, really?

  • Thanks to Slashdot coverage and community pressure, Microsoft has now officially promised to rename GVFS to something else,

    I am pretty sure ;) the change is not due to pressure, but due to this proposal:
    https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]

  • Gitty McGitFace Please
  • SameCrapDifferentName FS or SCDN-FS

  • Consistent naming (Score:4, Funny)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @01:25PM (#56737704) Homepage

    To keep consistent with Microsofts other product names, they should call it "File server." Like how they have "Sql server" as the name for their sql server, and "office" as the name of their office suite, and "Disk Operating System" is the name of their first disk operating system.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )
      I hear that the name "Object File System" isn't being used. Maybe they could try that.

  • This is no small thing, as small things go. Microsoft loves to name their products after the class of the product itself, e.g. Windows, Word.

    • Sure,MS claimed a large amount of the space (although I disagree that Word was the class of the product, but there are a ton of other examples). But the worst example was Amazon's Lambda service.

  • Simple and letting them off gently:

    MGVFS for Microsoft Git VFS
    or
    MSGVFS for MicroSoft Git VFS

  • Is this an official sign that MIcrosoft is finally listening to developers (albeit with a Slashdot-level of negative attention), or are they simply trying to appease the crowd while they are still in the news due to their acquisition of GitHub?

    No, it's a sign that the GNOME brand is toxic. So toxic that even Microsoft doesn't want their products to be associated with it in any way. Even by mistake.

  • Might suggest: GTFO, for Git Terrabyte File Operations

  • Basically this makes git into a centralized version control scheme rather than distributed.

    There are limitations of a fully distributed scheme (not well suited for large binary files, for example), but the limitations did at least induce a healthy set of sensibilities in developers using git. Keep large binary blobs out of your build tree, keep things so that each device is a full backup of the critical stuff, etc.

    This will mainly cause people who use it on their github repository to have a harder time lea

  • GVxFS - Git Virtual Filesystem or... Git Virtual eXtensible Filesystem

  • GitHub Virtual File System

  • MS is being nicer here than there is any good reason to be. Slashdots and other webshits will not thank them, any more than they have thanked MS for giving away their solution to this problem for free and developing it in the open, with community engagement.

  • Yeah, nah. Slashdot level attention is not what it used to be. I mean it's nice to feel like a self important regular member of a large powerful community, but the reality is most companies couldn't give two shits about what goes on here on slashdot, and given the "attention" we give to stupid and mundane things they aren't wrong either.

  • GFYS (Score:1)

    by sheph ( 955019 )
    Git Files Your Self.

  • WTFS (Score:2)

    by SLi ( 132609 )

    Call it What The F*** You Want Filesystem.

  • The name should be obvious. MSVFS. Microsoft Shit Virtual File System.

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