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

[Johannes Sixt]

Am 9/5/2011 14:53, schrieb Ian Monroe:
> 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.

But if you *have* to download the data files (and it seems that is
necessary to build and install kdegames), you can just as well have a
shallow clone of depth 1 in git. And then it does not matter whether you
downloaded 200MB using git or SVN.

It's a different matter if it is customary for kdegames developers to
download all source code, but data files of only one particular game. In
this case, SVN will have an advantage over git because with SVN you can
restrict the checkout to the directory of interest.

-- Hannes