Re: Git Vs. Svn for a project which *must* distribute binaries too.

[david@lang.hm]

On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Daniel Barkalow wrote:
>>
>> Actually, I've been playing with using git's data-distribution mechanism
>> to distribute generated binaries. You can do tags for arbitrary binary
>> content (not in a tree or commit), and, if you have some way of finding
>> the right tag name, you can fetch that and extract it.
>
> Yes, I think git should be very nice for doing binary stuff like firmware
> images too, my only worry is literally about "mixing it in" with other
> stuff.
>
> Putting lots of binary blobs into a git archive should work fine: but
> if you would then start tying them together (with a commit chain), it just
> means that even if you only really want _one_ of them, you end up getting
> them all, which sounds like a potential disaster.

if you put the binaries in a seperate repository and do shallow clones to 
avoid getting all the old stuff wouldn't that work well?

David Lang

> On the other hand, if you actually want a way to really *archive* the dang
> things, that may well be what you actually want. In that case, having a
> separate branch that only contains the binary stuff might actually be what
> you want to do (and depending on the kind of binary data you have, the
> delta algorithm might even be good at finding common data sequences and
> compressing it).
>
>> I came up with this at my job when we were trying to decide what to do
>> with firmware images that we'd shipped, so that we'd be able to examine
>> them again even if we lose the compiler version we used at the time. We
>> needed an immutable data store with a mapping of tags to objects, and I
>> realized that we already had something with these exact characteristics.
>
> Yeah, if you just tag individual blobs, git will keep track of them, but
> won't link them together, so you can easily just look up and fetch a
> single one from such an archive. Sounds sane enough.
>
> 		Linus
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