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Comment by xpaulbettsx | Hacker News Reader

I would ramp down your excitement, this doesn't solve any of the problems that Git has around large files. Dropping in a 1GB data file into your Git repo will cause problems for you, even if the server doesn't block it like GitHub does.

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Oh sure, but at least my limitation in the future will be Git being able to process and handle large files (and maybe the cost of storage) and not Github's file and repo limit.

It's reasonable to assume that Github's limits are caused by Git's limits. When Git begins supporting large files, most likely Github will be able to raise their limits as well.

You sure about that? Github is a SCM company, not a bulk storage company. When your business is not storage, arbitrarily large storage requests aren't interesting...

Github has gone through great lengths to begin supporting diffs on all sorts of files, 3d volumes, images, and all sorts of assets. I'd be willing to bet that some sort of bundled asset management is someone's dream project at Github.

They mention large binaries on the product page enough times to make me think that they're rewriting Git.

I'm not sure that a server-side rewrite addresses the core issue. Git is designed so that a git fetch pulls the entire repo down. The reason large binary files are a problem is because you are going to pull down the entire history of those files in order to clone the repo. Unless they're also shipping a custom git client (unlikely) then I don't see how they can solve this problem on their end.

edit: Come to think of it, the feature they could potentially implement their side is somehow making it so binary files have their history purged somehow. I'm not a git expert but if they are able to trick git into think the files are new, and have no history, each time they change then I guess that could work.

the core issue is not fetches. The last time I tried to use git to manage scientific data, commits sometimes took ~10 hours. And this was with all text files, not binaries. This was ~100k files and 20 gigs of data.

Unless that version of Git is also running on your computer, it doesn't change anything. The problem is with local files, not remote ones

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