Re: git and binary files

From: David Brown <git@davidb.org>
Date: Jan 18, 2008, 06:52 UTC
Message-ID: <20080118065201.GA4478@old.davidb.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0801161634080.5260@bender.nucleusys.com>

On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 04:39:19PM +0200, Petko Manolov wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>> As an experiment, it might be worth trying to store the uncompressed
>> versions instead (git will delta _and_ compress them for you).
>
> I don't have them uncompressed.
>
> I can try to convert those files into ascii format and then save them in 
> the repository.  Since most changes are incremental git should be able to 
> generate relatively small delta, which should compress well enough.

This won't help, only make things slightly worse.

The problem is when you compress the files, as soon as there is a difference between the two files, the output of the compressor will be entirely different for the remainder of the file. Unless you changes always are at the end of the file, you will end up pretty much entire versions in the repo.

I'm using some repos that get regular 50MB tarballs checked into them. I convinced them to not compress the tarballs, and git does a fairly decent job of doing delta compression between them (although it needs quite a bit of RAM to do so).

Dave