On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Daniel Barkalow wrote:
Actually, I've been playing with using git's data-distribution mechanism
to distribute generated binaries. You can do tags for arbitrary binary
content (not in a tree or commit), and, if you have some way of finding
the right tag name, you can fetch that and extract it.
Yes, I think git should be very nice for doing binary stuff like firmware
images too, my only worry is literally about "mixing it in" with other
stuff.
Putting lots of binary blobs into a git archive should work fine: but
if you would then start tying them together (with a commit chain), it just
means that even if you only really want _one_ of them, you end up getting
them all, which sounds like a potential disaster.
if you put the binaries in a seperate repository and do shallow clones to
avoid getting all the old stuff wouldn't that work well?
David Lang
On the other hand, if you actually want a way to really *archive* the dang
things, that may well be what you actually want. In that case, having a
separate branch that only contains the binary stuff might actually be what
you want to do (and depending on the kind of binary data you have, the
delta algorithm might even be good at finding common data sequences and
compressing it).
I came up with this at my job when we were trying to decide what to do
with firmware images that we'd shipped, so that we'd be able to examine
them again even if we lose the compiler version we used at the time. We
needed an immutable data store with a mapping of tags to objects, and I
realized that we already had something with these exact characteristics.
Yeah, if you just tag individual blobs, git will keep track of them, but
won't link them together, so you can easily just look up and fetch a
single one from such an archive. Sounds sane enough.
Linus
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