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Comment by dissident_coder | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion, but I still really like SVN and prefer Mercurial and Fossil to Git as distributed systems. You can install TortoiseSVN for a non-technical user and give them a quick rundown on how to checkout asset files from SVN, how to lock/unlock it when they need it and when they are done and how to commit they can more or less understand it and work with it. GFL getting someone to understand how to use Git LFS or dealing with merge conflicts on asset files.

Git's LFS/annexe extensions are serviceable for developers and technical folks but really are subpar compared to a centralized version control options.

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One of the conceits people forget about git is that it really is meant for text only.

I'm one of those weirdos who actually likes git LFS, but only because I admit all it's short comings. But it is working really well for my game dev project. Not what I use to manage my asset library though. It is what I use to sync the most up to date binary files, which is really the use case it is maintained for anyway (think syncing build artifacts or large data sets).

What do you use for assets then, if you don't mind my asking..?

Right now it is managed using blender, and then I back it up and version it manually, which is pretty common for blender workflows.

I am planning an overhaul in a bit. I looked into sun, but would probably rather use git lfs honestly. There are also options for uncompressed files to be stored as text, but it doesn't seem like you can get away from binary data completely. I haven't tried to hard to focus on it yet. It is somewhat frustrating that there isn't a clearly good free option.

I used SVN a lot before hg and git came out, and liked it, but once distributed systems were available it was just so much easier to clone copies and keep them wherever I wanted that I switched over and never looked back. I prefer hg for many of my personal projects (and not just coding--I store things like my blog in hg repos) because I find it simpler than git for basic repo operations.

I used to use HG for my personal projects but these days I use fossil and keep the database in dropbox, works shockingly well.

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