I’ve never used it for anything serious but my understanding is that Mercurial handles binary files better? Like it supports binary diffs if I understand correctly.
Any reason Git couldn’t get that?
Are there many binaries that people would store in git where this would actually help? I assume most files end up with compression or some other form of randomization between revisions making deduplication futile.
https://xethub.com/blog/benchmarking-the-modern-development-...
Editing the ID3 tag of an MP3 file or changing the rating metadata of an image will give a big advantage to block level deduplication. Only a few such cases are needed to more than compensate for that worse than nothing inefficiencies of binary diffs when there's nothing to deduplicate.
(It's been even longer since i used svn in anger, but maybe it could work too. It has file locking, and local storage cost is proportional to size of head revision. It was manageable enough with a 2 GB head revision. Metadata access speed was always terrible though, which was tedious.)
All deltas between versions are binary diffs.
Git has always handled large (including large binary) files just fine.
What it doesn't like is files where a conceptually minor change changes the entire file, for example compressed or encrypted files.
The only somewhat valid complaint is that if someone once committed a large file and then it was later deleted (maybe minutes later, maybe years later) then it is in the repo and in everyone's checkouts forever. Which applies equally to small and to large files, but large ones have more impact.
That's the whole point of a version control system. To preserve the history, allowing earlier versions to be recreated.
The better solution would be to have better review of changes pushed to the master repo, including having unreviewed changes in separate, potentially sacrificial, repos until approved.
But a good segmentation is only good for better compression and nicer diff, git could do byte wise diffs with no issues, so I wonder why doesn't git use customizable segmentation strategies where it calls external tools based on file type (eg a rust thingy for rust file etc, or a PNG thingy for PNG files).
At worst the tool would return either a single segment for the entire file or the byte wise split which would work anyway