Re: Better big file support & GSoC

["Carlos Martín Nieto" <cmn@elego.de>]

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