Git repository setup with binaries

Question

My company is considering implementing Git but I have a question about what the best way would be to set it up. We have 3 sites and are planning on using Gerrit2 to create m

Answer 1

Another alternative to git media mentioned by Marcelo is git annex:

See what git-annex is not:

git-annex is not git-media, although they both approach the same problem from a similar direction. I only learned of git-media after writing git-annex, but I probably would have still written git-annex instead of using it.

Currently, git-media has the advantage of using git smudge filters rather than git-annex's pile of symlinks, and it may be a tighter fit for certain situations.
It lacks git-annex's support for widely distributed storage, using only a single backend data store.
It also does not support partial checkouts of file contents, like git-annex does.

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Note: abdelsaid adds in the comments:

You can use git-annex with bup (bup allows you to have versions), see git-annex/ special remotes/ bup (and Using bup)

I have presented bup in more details in "git with large files"

Answer 2

Use git-media for large binaries. It stores references to binaries as SHA1 sums and hosts the binaries themselves in a place (and protocol) of your choosing. When you do a clone, it only fetches the binaries necessary to checkout the working copy.

Answer 3

Yet another possibility is git-fat (or Cyan's fork of git-fat with some enhancements); it is even lighter weight (depends only on Python and rsync) than git-media (Ruby), and definitely lighter than git-annex (Haskell). The cost of that is less configurability, but this may be the best solution in some cases.

Answer 4

To just use native git, use a separate repo to house the binaries via git submodules. This has worked for me on IVR systems which had a ton of gigantic .wav files. If you need further clarification, feel free to contact me.

Here's a good write up on them:

http://progit.org/book/ch6-6.html

hope this helps