[Kde-scm-interest] [Kde-games-devel] Data files and the Git move

Ian Monroe ian at monroe.nu
Mon Sep 5 12:53:29 UTC 2011


On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 14:01, Valentin Rusu <kde at rusu.info> wrote:
> On 09/04/2011 07:25 PM, Mathias Kraus wrote:
>> On Sonntag, 4. September 2011 14:11:37 Stefan Majewsky wrote:
>>> Hi folks,
>>>
>>> I think it should be clear that we need to move to git somewhen, and
>>> it is well known that I think it should happen sooner rather than
>>> later. There are established processes for building split repos, so
>>> the only problem left IMO is the problem of data files.
>>>
>>> 2. Git is bad for handling binary files: All history is downloaded
>>> when you clone the repo. The way how GIt compresses the history is
>>> aimed at text files, not at binary files. I think to remember that
>>> someone who used the svn2git rules on the whole kdegames history with
>>> data arrived at a 500MB repository, which is five times the size of
>>> kdelibs.
>>>
>>> So the questions which need to be solved before the git transition
>>> are: Where will the data reside? And, if in a separate repository, how
>>> do the dependencies look like?
>>>
>>> My answer is: Data shall stay in SVN (in a new module kdegames-data)
>>> for now, and be handled like the kde-wallpapers module after that.
> SVN doesn't handle well binary files neither. So there'll be ne benefit
> to let data files in there.

Erm, how so? SVN does just what you want with binary files in my
opinion. The benefit over Git is that with SVN you don't download the
entire history of a repo. With normal uncompressed text files this is
okay because Git compression is so good.

> If the lifecycle (e.g. update rate) of these files is different compared
> to source files (and that's I tend to believe), then it may be
> interesting IMO to have two GIT repos, one with sources and the other
> with data files (in text format if possible).

If it's a text file it can just be in the main git repo, it's not a
problem really then. For the purposes of this thread it's not a data
file. :)

Ian


More information about the Kde-scm-interest mailing list