Re: On Tracking Binary Files

Thanks very much for the explanation .


On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 15:42, Nicolas Pitre [off-list ref] wrote:

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009, Patrick Berkeley wrote:

quoted

Does Git track the deltas on binary files?

Yes.  And actually git's delta storage doesn't care at all whether a
file is text or binary.

quoted

Someone in #git mentioned that if the binaries change too much Git no
longer just stores the changes. If this is the case, what is the
breaking point where Git goes from storing the deltas to the entire
new file?

If two versions of the same file are simply too different to make delta
compression worth it, then no deltas are used.  It is still possible
that a third version of the same file would produce a nice delta against
either the first or second version though, in which case that third
version will be stored as a delta.  And so on.

A sophisticated set of euristics is applied to the list of objects as a
whole to determine the best delta arrangement possible.  So there is no
such thing as a simple "breaking point".


Nicolas