Comment by theli0nheart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theli0nheart | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure GitHub did their due diligence before starting to work on this, but I can't lie: it bums me out a bit that they didn't find git-bigstore [1] (a project I wrote about 2 years ago) before they started, since it works in almost the exact same way. Three-line pointer files, smudge and clean filters, use of .gitattributes for which files to sync, and remote service integration.

Compare "Git Large File Storage"'s file spec:

    version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1
    oid sha256:4d7a214614ab2935c943f9e0ff69d22eadbb8f32b1258daaa5e2ca24d17e2393
    size 12345

And bigstore's:

    bigstore
    sha256
    96e31e44688cee1b0a56922aff173f7fd900440f

Bigstore has the added benefit of keeping track of file upload / download history _entirely in Git_, using Git notes (an otherwise not-so-useful feature). Additionally, Bigstore is also _not_ tied to any specific service. There are built-in hooks to Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Rackspace.

Congrats to GitHub, but this leaves a sour taste in my mouth. FWIW, contributions are still welcome! And I hope there is still a future for bigstore.

[1]: https://github.com/lionheart/git-bigstore

I honestly hadn't seen git-bigstore. Git LFS started out as a Git Media update, actually. We changed the name pretty late in the process so that it didn't clash with existing Git Media repositories. Go was picked so that we could ship static binaries so its users don't have to worry about installing the correct ruby/python runtime and 3rd party dependencies.

Git LFS isn't tied to any specific service either. You can install our reference server somewhere, and start using it with your GitHub (or any host really) repositories without having to sit in our wait list or pay us a dime. Though our reference server isn't really production ready, so I wouldn't advise that for real work just yet :)

Looks like you wrote git-bigstore a few months after I wrote git-fat (also Python and a similar design; partially inspired by git-media). It would be interesting to do some performance comparisons and merge our capabilities, perhaps with support for each other's stub formats if we can do it in a compatible way.

Yep, agreed. That would be awesome.

It's also somewhat notable to mention that git-media was written by one of the founders of GitHub. So...that may be why? :)

Looks like you and GitHub are also both duplicating the git-media extension [1].

I haven't settled on one for my own use, but I'll compare features of bigstore and git-media before I do. Thanks for making your project available!

[1] https://github.com/alebedev/git-media

A lot of inspiration did come from the git-media project which goes back to at least 2009: https://github.com/alebedev/git-media/commit/705ea59bd98a3d1...

git-bigstore is awesome too though!

It seems to be based on git-media initially, would be interesting to know why they changed that https://github.com/github/git-lfs/commit/10a8eceefdb081edf61...

Very cool. Maybe this will shine a light on your project. First thing I looked for in their announcement was S3 support...

If you want s3 support consider using git-annex. GitLab.com and GitLab Enterprise Edition support it out of the box.

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