From: david@lang.hm Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2007 01:42:02 GMT Subject: Re: Git Vs. Svn for a project which *must* distribute binaries too. Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Daniel Barkalow wrote: >> >> Actually, I've been playing with using git's data-distribution mechanism >> to distribute generated binaries. You can do tags for arbitrary binary >> content (not in a tree or commit), and, if you have some way of finding >> the right tag name, you can fetch that and extract it. > > Yes, I think git should be very nice for doing binary stuff like firmware > images too, my only worry is literally about "mixing it in" with other > stuff. > > Putting lots of binary blobs into a git archive should work fine: but > if you would then start tying them together (with a commit chain), it just > means that even if you only really want _one_ of them, you end up getting > them all, which sounds like a potential disaster. if you put the binaries in a seperate repository and do shallow clones to avoid getting all the old stuff wouldn't that work well? David Lang > On the other hand, if you actually want a way to really *archive* the dang > things, that may well be what you actually want. In that case, having a > separate branch that only contains the binary stuff might actually be what > you want to do (and depending on the kind of binary data you have, the > delta algorithm might even be good at finding common data sequences and > compressing it). > >> I came up with this at my job when we were trying to decide what to do >> with firmware images that we'd shipped, so that we'd be able to examine >> them again even if we lose the compiler version we used at the time. We >> needed an immutable data store with a mapping of tags to objects, and I >> realized that we already had something with these exact characteristics. > > Yeah, if you just tag individual blobs, git will keep track of them, but > won't link them together, so you can easily just look up and fetch a > single one from such an archive. Sounds sane enough. > > Linus > - > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html >