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Tackling Git Limitations with Singular Large Line-seperated Plaintext files

From
JHJarrad Hope <me@jarradhope.com>
Date
Jun 27, 2014, 08:45 UTC
Message-ID
<CAJoVafc1LMxmvCiWci3N+AuAZBsABR3Wb3c6c3stw93OJZ7Scw@mail.gmail.com>
Hello,

As a software developer I've used git for years and have found it the perfect solution for source control.

Lately I have found myself using git in a unique use-case - modifying DNA/RNA sequences and storing them in git, which are essentially software/source code for cells/life. For Bacteria and Viruses the repo's are very small <10mb & compress nicely.

However on the extreme end of the spectrum a human genome can run in at 50gb or say ~1gb per file/chromosome.

Now, this is not the binary problem and it is not the same as storing media inside git - I have reviewed the solutions that exist for the binary problem, such as git-annex, git-media & bup. But they don't provide the featureset of git and the data i'm storing is more like plaintext sourcecode with relatively small edits per commit.

I have googled and asked in #git which discussion mostly revolved around these tools.

The only project that holds interest is a 2009 project, git-bigfiles - however it is abit dated & the author is not interested in reviving this project - referring me to git-annex. Unfortunately.

With that background; I wanted to discuss the problems with git and how I can contribute to the core project to best solve them.

>From my understanding the largest problem revolves around git's delta

discovery method, holding 2 files in memory at once - is there a reason this could not be adapted to page/chunk the data in a sliding window fashion ?

Are there any other issues I need to know about, is anyone else working on making git more capable of handling large source files that I can collaborate with?

Thanks for your time, Jarrad

Next: Shawn Pearce
Message 1 of 10 in “Tackling Git Limitations with Singular Large Line-seperated Plaintext files”
  1. Jarrad HopeJun 27, 2014
  2. Shawn PearceJun 27, 2014
  3. Junio C HamanoJun 27, 2014
  4. Linus TorvaldsJun 27, 2014
  5. Linus TorvaldsJun 27, 2014
  6. Jason PyeronJun 27, 2014
  7. Linus TorvaldsJun 27, 2014
  8. Jarrad HopeJun 28, 2014
  9. Jakub NarębskiJun 30, 2014
  10. Øyvind A. HolmAug 10, 2014

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