Re: Git Large Object Support Proposal

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 04:44:49PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Aha, that sounds like you can just maintain a set of out-of-tree symbolic
> links that you keep track of, and let other people (e.g. rsync) deal with
> the complexity of managing that side of the world.
> 
> And I think you can start experimenting it without any change to the core
> datastructures.  In your single-page web site in which its sole html file
> embeds an mpeg movie, you keep track of these two things in git:
> 
> 	porn-of-the-day.html
>         porn-of-the-day.mpg -> ../media/6066f5ae75ec.mpg
> 
> and any time you want to feed a new movie, you update the symlink to a
> different one that lives outside the source-controlled tree, while
> arranging the link target to be updated out-of-band.

I have a repo like this (not porn, but large files :) ) and I use a
similar solution. Instead of large blobs, I have stub files containing a
URL, and the make process pulls them as necessary. It works pretty well
in practice. I don't bother with naming the files by sha-1 but instead
give them human-readable names, since in my case they are generally
immutable (i.e., one a name is assigned, the content doesn't change).

-Peff