Any problem with a 1.8MB blob in the tree? Re: Please try to upgrade an alpha10 when enforcing new rules in samdb

[Michael Wood]

Hi

On 15 August 2010 12:25, Andrew Bartlett <abartlet at samba.org> wrote:
[...]
> Is there any problem adding a 1.8MB blob to our samba4 testsuite?  It is
> an old Samba4 provision we wish to upgrade.  We may add more in future,
> and it could get out of hand, but on the flip side, without this we
> can't hold to our promises about upgrades very well.
>
> Thoughts?

I don't think it's really recommended to put large binary blobs in the
repository.  (Whether you consider 2MB to be large is a separate issue
:)  It's not really a problem with Subversion because if you check out
a revision without the large file you don't pay for it.  With git, you
will always get every revision of every large binary file when you
clone (unless you do a shallow clone, but then I don't think you can
push changes from the cloned repository to anywhere else.)

"Pro Git" says this, (http://progit.org/book/ch9-7.html):

There are a lot of great things about Git, but one feature that can
cause issues is the fact that a git clone  downloads the entire
history of the project, including every version of every file. This is
fine if the whole thing is source code, because Git is highly
optimized to compress that data efficiently. However, if someone at
any point in the history of your project added a single huge file,
every clone for all time will be forced to download that large file,
even if it was removed from the project in the very next commit.
Because it’s reachable from the history, it will always be there.

Also, a cursory search on google shows many people trying to remove a
large file from the history of their repository, which seems to imply
that getting the large file into the repo in the first place should
probably be avoided.

-- 
Michael Wood <esiotrot at gmail.com>