Re: binary safe?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Nov 3, 2005, 22:50 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0511031447020.27915@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <86br115r0z.fsf@blue.stonehenge.com>

On Thu, 3 Nov 2005, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> 
> I'm currently about to abandon CVS for my website management,
> replacing it with git.
> 
> What problems, if any, will I have using git to manage the binary
> files for my site, like the custom icons?  CVS is doing that just fine
> now.

Git doesn't have any textual representations anywhere.

So the _only_ problem should be "git diff" (and related patch-based tools 
- git-apply etc). They'll simply not work. For similar reasons, a 
three-way merge will obviously fail.

> I presume emailing diff-patches is out of the question, but if all I'm
> doing is git-push and git-pull (using the shared central repository
> model), and if I'm stupid enough to have a merge error it's OK to just
> blow up on a binary file, will everything else work fine?

Yes. I don't think it's been heavily tested, but the very architecture of git should mean that there just shouldn't be any issues with binary files outside of the obvious ones.

The only binary file the kernel ever uses is the logo.gif thing, so it's been "tested" in the sense that binary files exist, but there's never been any changes to that file, so..

		Linus