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.
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?
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On Thu, 3 Nov 2005, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
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
On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 02:02:20PM -0800, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
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.
We're now using git in production to distribute content, of which well
over 90% is binary files. Works great.
--
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 02:50:21PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
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 always thought it would be nice for binary files if SCMs could
export a summary of what ranges of bytes changes or even xdelta'ish
details.
Given that people do stick large multi-MB binary blobs in SCMs and
sometimes these update only a few bytes at a time it has some value.