Re: git and binary files

[Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>]

Petko Manolov <petkan@nucleusys.com> writes:

> On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> 
> > 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"

You can always tag a blob (like junio-gpg-pub tag in git.git repository),
but it wouldn't be in a working directory. But it would get distributed
on clone.

BTW. if those large binary files doesn't differ much between version,
they should get well compressed even if you would store them normally,
all revisions.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git