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Show HN: Gitfs – mount Git repos as local folders

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Re: Show HN: Gitfs – mount Git repos as local folders

#61
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my understanding that Git is pretty bad for storing binary files that change a lot since it has to keep a copy of every version of that file (whereas with plaintext it can just store the diffs). Now, maybe that's what you would want, but that repo is going to get very big very fast. Pulls won't be so bad if your machine already has all the commits, but cloning would be a nightmare. And it'll be taking up a lot o…

It's not exactly plaintext versus binary. Git "stores" a copy of every file, no matter the content. But it also does "delta compression" between objects when you run "git gc"; it tries to find binary diffs between objects that are similar. So the poor performance comes from files that don't "delta" well. These tend to be things which are compressed or encrypted, where a small semantic change can cascade into a lot of…

Incidentally, the new office formats (both the "open" and the open one) are zip-files with (among other things) xml-documents. I saw someone a while back recommending storing them uncompressed when working with VCS -- gives pretty useful diffs with no extra work (I forget if they recommended extracting, or just storing without compression).

Re: Show HN: Gitfs – mount Git repos as local folders

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've had the idea to make an interative design/architecture plugin for programs like photoshop/3dmax/etc Hah, same idea here. I used to live with 3d artists, and I asked "How do you live without Git?!", they said they version their files into milestones (e.g. environment-milestone1.3ds) and upload them all to Dropbox. I think Git wouldn't gain as much traction as you'd expect, there's just easier (for non-programme…

Yeah, was watching some designer friends of mine, and they have all this back and forth with clients, and keep immaculate notes with every stage of the transformation (from concept to finished design), I was wondering why in the world it wasn't automated. Yeah, I'm not really planning on introducing them to git, more using git behind the scenes to get all those good qualities (undos, infinite history, instant backup)…

There exist various solutions -- the technology is called Digital Asset Managements (DAM). There are some open source/Free ones as well. But none that are really good AFAIK.

You generally have the option of either using lots of data and bandwidth (think: storing rendered 4/8K jpeg2000 frames of animations, for each new version/cut/render you want to keep) -- or tight integration with the various software involved (ie: only keep latest "render" -- and a track of changes/a "script/log" that can be used to render/generate all the missing versions).

I'd think in general 3d meshes shouldn't be too hard -- but good luck finding someone doing media that don't use some big bitmaps somewhere (textures, backgrounds, etc).

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