Re: git and binary files

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jan 16, 2008, 13:54 UTC
Message-ID: <20080116135420.GA21588@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0801161521500.5260@bender.nucleusys.com>

On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 03:39:06PM +0200, Petko Manolov wrote:

> What i am trying to suggest is that there might be cases when you need  
> something in the repository, but you don't want GIT to keep it's history  
> nor it's predecessors.  Leaving it out breaks the atomicity of such  
> repository and makes the project management more complex.

But not versioning some files while versioning others breaks the atomicity of project version, which is at the core of git's model. There is no such thing as "this file is at revision X, but that one is at revision Y." There is only "the project is at revision X."

Show 8 quoted lines

> There's a few examples out there that shows how to solve this, but it  
> seems inconvenient and involves branching, cloning, etc.  Isn't it  
> possible to add something like:
>
> 	"git nohistory firmware.bin"
>
> or
> 	"git nohistory -i-understand-this-might-be-dangerous firmware.bin"

Not easily. It goes against the underlying data model at the core of git.

How big are your firmware files? How often do they change, and how large are the changes? IOW, have you confirmed that repacking does not produce an acceptable delta, meaning you get versioning for very low space cost?

-Peff