Microsoft has completed the move of their Windows codebase from Source Depot to Git using GVFS.
According to Brian Harry, Corporate VP at Microsoft, the company decided to change their engineering system a couple of years ago. While some of the tools are common across the enterprise, others are peculiar to one or few teams, making collaboration more difficult and resulting in tool and process differences with all the negative impact associated to them. The engineering system for a company the size of Microsoft covers many domains – source control, build, release, testing, telemetry, static analysis, security, etc. – being too difficult to address in one step, so they decided to tackle work planning, source control, and build first.
One of the first steps was to standardize the entire company on Visual Studio Team Services, from which all the other tools would be made available. When it comes to source control, most of the company used TFS, except the very large teams – Windows and Office – which remained on Source Depot, a VCS introduced at Microsoft in early 2000s. Nobody wanted to embark into the task of moving those two teams to a different system, the costs being considered too high.
After debating several options - TFVC, Source Depot, Git, Mercurial – Microsoft decided to try and see if Git was a proper solution. While Microsoft had no problem moving small or medium repositories to Git, they encountered serious scaling issues with large ones:
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