5 ms·
What are the disadvantages to using plain Git for your data?
by gms 12y ago
What are the disadvantages to using plain Git for your data?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- thewopr 12y agoWhat if your data are formatting in text? Why would branching be any more expensive for data than for code then?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- xahrepap 12y agoI don't think it's branching. From what I understand, it's changing the file. Rather than storing a diff for non-text files, it just keeps the old versions around. So if you store a lot of binary files that change very often, it makes your repo huge. We had this problem before we moved to a dependency manager. Our repo was almost 2gb, even though the checked out code was well under 1gb.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- xahrepap 12y agoThe way I understand it, branches in git are essentially just a pointer to a revision, which automatically gets updated as you make changes. Branches don't have any overhead.
- chousuke 12y agoGit's storage model is such that every commit is physically a snapshot of the entire work tree. Git makes this efficient with delta compression (essentially, deduplication) which is extremely efficient for text (in fact an entire git repository can be smaller than a single SVN checkout) but is less effective with large binary files since changes don't produce compressible deltas.
- koenigdavidmj 12y ago> in fact an entire git repository can be smaller than a single SVN checkout Only because svn downloads the plain text of the server's version of every single file from the revision, so that "svn diff" doesn't have to hit the server.