How is it possible that nobody has dealt with this problem yet?
You can try to cronjob the updates, staggered around 4am. Or you can realize that the majority of people are only modifying a subset of these assets, and roll your own link-based asset manager for large binaries.
You handle versioning either through filesystem snapshots, or by just using different paths for each version.
Of course not, it's not their problem. What annoys me is that the "You must use DVCS" memo is being sent around uncritically, and anyone who does not fit the use case is left out.
I think that people who deal with images/spreadsheets/data would also benefit from a good VCS tool. If the coders, having scratched their itch, did not declare the problem solved and move on ...
P.S. thanks for the polite answer. So, there is either no problem or no solution ... I think we're done here.
No version control system, centralized or distributed, actually handles blobs better than just treating them as artifacts and using rsync.
The only way to actually solve the problem is to make the data not be blobs anymore, where the diff/merge/serialization code all understands at least the structural container format and can render it usefully. There's never going to be a general purpose tool that does that outside of a live-in smalltalk image (or similar).
The best you're going to get is tools vertically-integrated with the application, and all the ones I've seen to date (MS Office, Adobe Version Cue, etc.) all do a terrible job of even doing diffs/RCS, much less actually implementing a real VCS.
It's interesting that the names are "Distributed Version Control Systems", or "Revision Control", but the ghost of the word "source" (meaning code text, in 1972's SCCS) is still read into it.
Surprisingly, when DVCS are shouted as the bees' knees for everybody, people who have images, documents and data may think they were included. Apparently not, those benighted heathens should use rsync or whatever manually, and not soil the "source control" systems with their binaries. Or go find not-included plug-ins, if they can.
(Those people are apparently too dumb to understand that a binary "artifact" produced with an image editor, spreadsheet, or data analysis tool is fundamentally different from a blessed code file written with a text editor, and thus is not entitled to be under real version control, or have a DCVS tool automatically do something smart about it.)
The Perforce guys must be laughing their asses off.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1201559, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1219082, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222905, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1242374