Re: git and binary files

From: Petko Manolov <petkan@nucleusys.com>
Date: Jan 16, 2008, 13:39 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0801161521500.5260@bender.nucleusys.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LSU.1.00.0801161113170.17650@racer.site>

On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> Your subject is a little bit misleading, no?  It's not about the 
> binariness (git handles binary files just fine, thankyouverymuch), but 
> about the not-tracking them.

You're absobloodylutely correct. I was too preoccupied defining my problem in a better way, which left the subject kind of dumb. Well, quite dumb. :-)

> The answer is no.  You cannot ask git to have the newest version of 
> something, but not the old ones.  It contradicts the distributedness of 
> git, too.

I don't agree here. Assume that whatever you're working on require firmware for a device that won't change during the lifetime of the software project. The newest version of the said firmware is mostly bugfixes and you basically don't want to revert to the older ones. Consider the microcode for modern Pentiums, Core 2, etc.

What i am trying to suggest is that there might be cases when you need something in the repository, but you don't want GIT to keep it's history nor it's predecessors. Leaving it out breaks the atomicity of such repository and makes the project management more complex.

There's a few examples out there that shows how to solve this, but it seems inconvenient and involves branching, cloning, etc. Isn't it possible to add something like:

 	"git nohistory firmware.bin"

or
 	"git nohistory -i-understand-this-might-be-dangerous firmware.bin"

cheers, Petko