Re: Better big file support & GSoC

On Sat, Apr 02, 2011 at 04:40:51PM +0200, Jonathan Michalon wrote:

[...]
Eric Montellese says: "Don't track binaries in git. Track their hashes." I agree
here too. We should not treat computer data like source code (or whatever text).
He claims that he needs to handle repos containing source code + zipped tarballs
+ large and/or many binaries. Users seem to really need binary tracking and
therefore git should do it. I personally needed to a couple of times.

He also says that we could want to do download-as-needed and remove-unnecessary
operations, and I think that it may be clean enough to add a git command like
'git blob' to handle special operations for binaries. Perhaps in a second step.

Another idea was to create "sparse" repos, considered leafs as they may not be
cloned from because they lack full data. But it may or may not be in the
spirit of Git...


What I personally would like as a feature is the ability to store the main
repo with sources etc. into a conventional repo but put the data elsewhere
on a storage location. This would allow to develop programs which need data
to run (like textures in games etc.) without making the repo slow, big or
just messy.

 This sounds a lot like like what git-annex [0] does. Maybe
 integrating its functionality with mainline git could be a good
 start.

[0] http://git-annex.branchable.com/

   cmn
-- 
Carlos Martín Nieto | http://cmartin.tk