Hacker News Reader

... why do you have 1TB of source code (you don't! mandatory hacker snark) Is git really supposed to be used for data? Or is this just a git-like interface for source control on data?

View on HN

Git is only not "supposed" to be used for data because it doesn't work very well with data by default. Not because that's not a useful and sensible thing to want from a VCS.

It's a fundamentally bad idea because of how any DVCS works. You really don't want to be dragging around gigabytes of obsolete data forever.

Something like git-lfs is the appropriate solution. You need a little bit of centralization.

Because of how Git's current implementation of DVS works. There's nothing fundamental about it. Git already supports partial clones and on-demand checkouts in some ways, it's just not very ergonomic.

All that's really needed is a way to mark individual files as lazily fetched from a remote only when needed. LFS is a hacky substandard way to emulate that behaviour. It should be built in to Git.

Game development, especially Unreal engine, can produce repos in excess of 1TB. Git LFS is used extensively for binary file support.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com