[sugar] binary file in tamtam.git

[Ivan Krstić]

Stephen Thorne wrote:
> Until a decent solution that doesn't interrupt the development
> processes of the TamTam team can be implemented, I don't see a 250kb
> .so file being kept under version control as being an issue.

The problem is that every time you commit a new version of the file,
you'll add a new 250KB to the history. Git doesn't do shallow clones
yet, meaning every new user cloning the tree, has to pull down the
entire history. eToys has been keeping their binary image in the tree
(something like a meg, if I remember correctly), and it's inflated their
tree size to 200MB.


James Bergstra wrote:
> What about simply migrating TamTam to SVN entirely?  We would have to re-do our
> installation script if the git-db is no longer present, but it would be an
> hour's work for one person at most.

I'm strongly opposed to this. Keeping binaries in the tree is a corner
case, and supporting it better is not worth the mental overhead of
having to get potential contributors to figure out which VCS each
individual tree is kept in, or no longer being able to list all the
trees in their current version on dev.laptop.org.

I'm thinking about better ways to support versioned binaries. There are
several options.

-- 
Ivan Krsti? <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D