Re: Fwd: Git and Large Binaries: A Proposed Solution

From: Eric Montellese <emontellese@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 21, 2011, 22:00 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTikj-+bVW6P42Ejz+T=CtKTwUKBF6BmEDSBeZbL6@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <201101211436.32033.wjl@icecavern.net>

Thanks Wesely,

I did take a look at git annex -- it looks to me as though that project is more of a special-case, allowing users to use git to track things like music and movies. While it's possible this might be usable for the use case I described, what I'm really looking for is a true extension of git which allows binaries to be treated differently (if the user desires) when using git as a source management tool.

The major difference I see with git-annex is that the user must specifically tell git-annex to download certain files. Instead, I want the user to always automatically have *all* of the files (both source and binaries) for the current revision -- but not necessarily for hundreds (thousands?) of past revisions (which as git is implemented currently would take up many gigabytes)

git-annex does look like a neat piece of software, but I don't think it quite fits here -- thank you again for the comment though!

Eric

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 4:36 PM, Wesley J. Landaker <wjl@icecavern.net> wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> On Friday, January 21, 2011 11:57:21 Eric Montellese wrote:
>> To whet your appetite to read all of the below (I know it's long),
>> this is the root of the solution:
>>
>> ---       Don't track binaries in git.  Track their hashes.       ---
>
> Comment from the peanut gallery:
>
> I haven't read your approach in great detail, but just in case you are not
> aware, there is a project call git-annex <http://git-annex.branchable.com/>
> by Joey Hess that I believe takes a similar approach.
>
> Since you've obviously given this a lot of thought, you might want to take a
> peek at that and see if it already does what you want, or if your proposal
> does something significantly different/better.
>