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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

> you are trying to force a bad usecase

The world has non-text files that require version control support. Version control systems are mostly bad-to-terrible for anything other than source code. Implying that the use case is wrong is borderline offensive.

It’d be nice if there were some artist/designer friendly version control systems. I can teach someone who has never even heard of version control how to use Perforce in 10 minutes. It’s darn near idiot proof and near impossible to shoot your foot off. Git is not easy to use. This is evidenced by the tens of thousands of blogs explaining how easy and simple to use it is. If that were the case there wouldn’t be need for all those posts!

Someday.

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> The world has non-text files that require version control support

Which is fine, but saying that git is rubbish because it doesn't handle binary files as you want it to is a bad usecase.

How version control would handle diffs between PDFs is not the same as photos, which is not the same as video. They have to be content aware for these sorts of things.

Well, to be frank, git doesn't really handle binary files _at all_. I don't really consider treating binary files as opaque blobs of data as 'handling them'. It's more akin to throwing your hands up and saying 'fuck it, we'll treat it like the text stuff and whatever happens, happens.' Yes, over time git has gained some capability for handling binary data as delta patches, but it is so far away from anything even remotely resembling content-awareness.

Because no one is driving a universal content aware diff, as far as I can tell.

If you just want images then gitlab does a good enough job.

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-test/-/commit/2f63565e7...

How would we represent video diffs? I don't deal with video so I'm not an expert, but there appears to be people complaining without suggesting solutions.

Not all version controlled files can be merged. That’s fine. Git sucks at working with large binary files. Perforce does not. Therefore all game devs use Perforce.

A theoretical Git2 could provide Perforce-tier support for large binary files. But, imho, this would likely require dropping the D in DVCS. I would gladly trade distributed for large binary file support. Without even a moment’s hesitation. Other people wouldn’t. But I wouldn’t call their use case “bad”.

Git is rubbish for my needs. It’s rubbish for a lot of needs. It’s ok at some things. Mercurial is much better at those things though.

Text is a universally understood file format. That means it can be easily diffed, compressed, smartly stored (like storing only changes). That's not true of binaries, at least most of them. That's why I'm pessimistic about a good universal VCS ever existing.

I would also love some kind of good (even decent would be enough) VCS for binary/non-text files. I get a stress rash just watching our designers work with "final_final_2023_1_backup_new.psd".

I think Git is relatively simple in relation to all the complicated things you can do with it. If you don't need/use those complicated things, it of course feels like way too much work for too little pay off.

Then use Perforce? Why are you complaining that something doesn't exist and then literally naming it in the next sentence!

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