Git 2.13-rc1 Released

[bug77]

It doesn't cease to amaze me how people misuse tools and they blame said tools for doing a poor job. I swear one day I'm going to start hammering nails with a microscope and then complain the manufacturer doesn't support my use case too well even if all it it takes is a little effort.

Git is meant for source code. You want to version random artifacts, use Ivy or something.

[TheBlackCat]

They are the only type where diff(1) and patch(1) make sense.

Which is totally irrelevant. Yes, tools designed to work with a particular binary format only work with that binary format. That doesn't mean that a particulary arbitrary set of tools should be the one and only standard for which sort of binary format should be allowed to exist.

And I noticed you completely ignored pretty much everything I said.

[ldo17]

@Ido17:
So how would you solve embedding a micro-controller firmware like its common in embedded systems?
Getting it from somewhere external, or recompiling (with separate tools you might not have installed locally) will add inconsistencies, complexities and problems to any build system.

Build products don’t belong in version control.

This is why we distinguish between a development source tree and a distribution source tree. The development source tree is what we keep in version control, the distribution source tree is what we produce for stable releases.

[ldo17]

Yes, tools designed to work with a particular binary format only work with that binary format. That doesn't mean that a particulary arbitrary set of tools should be the one and only standard for which sort of binary format should be allowed to exist.

I look at things with a developer’s eye. If a video animation is generated from some source assets according to a script, doesn’t it make more sense to put those source assets into version control, rather than the final product? Then generate the video animation automatically as part of the build process.

[ldo17]

Git is meant for source code. You want to version random artifacts, use Ivy or something.

When I was first looking at Android programming, I was just filled with dismay at the number of projects on GitHub that had checked in the entire contents of the /gen/ and /build/ directories -- all the build crap, in other words...

[ldo17]

I am pretty sure one could implement a difftool for any type of data. Raster/svg images, odt documents...

SVG is already XML text. And ODT allows for an extracted ZIP format which is text-only if you exclude embedded binary lumps.

So you see, we are closer to there than you might think.

[TheBlackCat]

I look at things with a developer’s eye. If a video animation is generated from some source assets according to a script, doesn’t it make more sense to put those source assets into version control, rather than the final product? Then generate the video animation automatically as part of the build process.

That doesn't help with video and sound recordings, nor would it help with reference renders used for regression testing. And even if those source assets were somehow text-based, the text results would almost certainly not be in a format that humans could easily interpret, so the diffs wouldn't be useful.

[TheBlackCat]

SVG is already XML text.

Have you actually looked at the XML of an svg? Taking a diff is only useful when it tells you what has changed and how. A diff of a non-trivial SVG is pretty much impossible to make sense of. And two nearly identical-looking SVGs can have completely unrelated XML text, which means such a diff is next to useless for telling you about what humans actually care about.

So yes, in principle you can take a diff of an SVG, but it isn't actually useful except as some sort of incremental backup.

[cj.wijtmans]

When I was first looking at Android programming, I was just filled with dismay at the number of projects on GitHub that had checked in the entire contents of the /gen/ and /build/ directories -- all the build crap, in other words...

then patch it out along with .gitignore...

[bug77]

When I was first looking at Android programming, I was just filled with dismay at the number of projects on GitHub that had checked in the entire contents of the /gen/ and /build/ directories -- all the build crap, in other words...

Dismay? You must have not had the "privilege" of working on a project built with ant (every dependency goes under lib) and then checked into (pardon the expression) CVS.