Re:Elfshaker: Version control system fine-tuned for binaries
by dilap on Friday November 19, 2021 @09:08AM
(#29277235)
Thanks for the response! I was more just curious about future possibilities vs immediate practicle use.
git-lfs just offloads the storage of the large binaries to a remote site, and then downloads on demand.
If you have a lot of binary assets like artwork or huge excel spreadsheets, it's very useful, because in those cases, without git-lfs, the git repo will get very large, git will get extremely slow, and github will get angry at you for having too large a repo.
But it's not all roses with git-lfs, since now you're reliant on the external network to do checkouts, vs having fetched everything at once w/ the initial clone, and also of course just switching between revisions can get slower since you're network-limited to fetch those large files. (And though I'm not sure, it doesn't seem like git-lfs is doing any local caching.)
So you could imagine where something like having elfshaker embedded in the repo and integrated as a checkout filter could potentially be a useful alternative. Basically an efficient way to store binaries directly in the repo.
(Maybe it would be too small a band of use cases to be practicle though? Obviously if you have lots of distinct art assets, that's just going to be big, no matter what...)
git-lfs just offloads the storage of the large binaries to a remote site, and then downloads on demand.
If you have a lot of binary assets like artwork or huge excel spreadsheets, it's very useful, because in those cases, without git-lfs, the git repo will get very large, git will get extremely slow, and github will get angry at you for having too large a repo.
But it's not all roses with git-lfs, since now you're reliant on the external network to do checkouts, vs having fetched everything at once w/ the initial clone, and also of course just switching between revisions can get slower since you're network-limited to fetch those large files. (And though I'm not sure, it doesn't seem like git-lfs is doing any local caching.)
So you could imagine where something like having elfshaker embedded in the repo and integrated as a checkout filter could potentially be a useful alternative. Basically an efficient way to store binaries directly in the repo.
(Maybe it would be too small a band of use cases to be practicle though? Obviously if you have lots of distinct art assets, that's just going to be big, no matter what...)