LWN: Comments on "What's coming in Git 2.4.0"

Large File Storage

nye — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 09:59:17 +0000

>Also only supported on NTFS

Well I wouldn't say that's really a problem - I think NTFS is the only fs Windows can be installed on.

But anyway, surely the use of symlinks is really just an implementation detail that could be replaced with fake symlinks (Cygwin style, or whatever) easily enough if there was a will? I guess there must be bigger (design/conceptual) differences between git-annex and LFS.

The LFS web site certainly looks swanky; it must be good software.

Large File Storage

mathstuf — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 20:28:09 +0000

As for the administrator, I think it's their way to avoid symlink attacks since ~no applications are prepared for such things.

Large File Storage

mathstuf — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 20:27:24 +0000

Also only supported on NTFS (and exFAT?). My Android phone has the "brokenfs" option set and also has empty files sitting there, so maybe exFAT also doesn't support them.

Basically it just means that the Gallery app just shows lots of empty boxes after I sync.

Large File Storage

nye — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 16:00:27 +0000

>>Well, git-annex uses symlinks into a repo and broken links indicate files are missing. This obviously doesn't work on Windows
>Why not?

Oh wait, I think I've worked it out: It appears that, by default, only administrators can create symlinks on Windows for some crazy reason. This would therefore require either running as an administrator or changing the system security policy, neither of which make for an enjoyable user experience.

Large File Storage

nye — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 15:53:57 +0000

>Well, git-annex uses symlinks into a repo and broken links indicate files are missing. This obviously doesn't work on Windows

Why not?

What's coming in Git 2.4.0

nix — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 22:51:22 +0000

I spy someone who's had too much to do with IBM systems :)

What's coming in Git 2.4.0

toyotabedzrock — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 08:14:17 +0000

He should output a second log with just message numbers and a map to link them to standard error category types with uuids so that better descriptions and new more detailed messages can be added and no ones parsing gets broken.

deployment via git

robbe — Mon, 13 Apr 2015 11:01:35 +0000

It seems popular enough that there are HOWTO pages about it:
http://gitolite.com/deploy.html

What's coming in Git 2.4.0

bronson — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 05:49:10 +0000

Deploying with git is great. I'm pushing to three live servers now, and will be rolling more out soon.

I'm using https://github.com/mislav/git-deploy

Admittedly, the project is mostly stagnant, and `git deploy setup` only wants to set up the master branch. But, the code is simple and deploys are quick. Compared to all the other deploy techniques I've used in the past, it's my favorite so far.

Large File Storage

mathstuf — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 13:05:55 +0000

Well, git-annex uses symlinks into a repo and broken links indicate files are missing. This obviously doesn't work on Windows or other broken file systems, so instead, files are empty if they are not local in those cases.

One nice thing about git-annex is that I am not required to have the data locally (I use this to rotate out photos from my mobile devices onto my main server while having a few months' worth of photos locally). It also has a semblance of where the data is and can fetch it from any of those places (if it is still available at that time). This is also what allows it to do the "keep X MB local" logic since it can safely delete data it knows is on the server. It would appear to me that git-lfs requires the data to always be available since it uses a smudge filter.

Large File Storage

fishface60 — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 08:04:29 +0000

Having had a look at how it works, it appears to use exactly the same mechanism as git-fat, where it uses a smudge filter to translate files as they go between the index to the committed tree object.

I'm just concerned that the result will be yet another weird proprietary extension. git-fat at least used the wide-spread rsync daemon as the backend for file storage.

Large File Storage

fishface60 — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 07:58:58 +0000

Or indeed git-fat, or any of the other attempts to support large data files in a git repository.

Large File Storage

Felix.Braun — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 07:06:07 +0000

It would have been interesting how git LFS differs from the venerable git-annex.