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by OneMoreGoogler 3646 days ago
Checkouts are apparently instantaneous. Behind the scenes, there is a FUSE filesystem that faults in files by querying Google's cloud servers. So it does not require a significant amount of space (but does require fast access to Google's servers, which can be problematic).

Almost all engineers have access to the "complete system," which is really Google's server-side software. Other repos like Android have historically been more locked-down, but there's been some recent effort to open them up within Google.

Presumably if you tried to copy all of the files, you'd first be rate-limited, then get an access denied, and lastly a visit from corporate security. I wouldn't want to try.

2 comments

> Presumably if you tried to copy all of the files, you'd first be rate-limited, then get an access denied, and lastly a visit from corporate security. I wouldn't want to try.

And there's no way it'd fit on a single hard drive.

Is it a good idea to try to run the du command in the root directory?
Probably even better to try sudo -i! ;-)