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

[Eric Montellese <emontellese@gmail.com>]

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:
> 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.
>