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With that in mind it seems like there is a market for a git replacement for these huge repos.

• to3m 15y ago
  I fear the market would be small. It is my guess (though I have no proof) that most places with particularly large repositories have lots of binary files in them. It's hard to get a 15GB repository if you just have text. This sort of thing suggests a centralized check-in/check-out model, because binary files are difficult to merge sensibly, and nobody wants to spend terabytes of hard drive space storing the repository locally. And your centralized check-in/check-out needs, whatever scale they might be, are probably tolerably well served by one of the existing solutions.
  • alttag 15y ago
    Yes, but why is that a show stopper? It's a small market filled only with people who typically have large fist-fulls of cash and are dependent on version control. It's a small market, but companies in it have the resources for a good solution.
    • gchpaco 15y ago
      Because those companies generally already pay the $$$ for Perforce (which has any number of deeply terrifying, shiny red candylike self destruct buttons and makes git's user interface look kind) which for all its other faults handles this specific user case extremely well.
  • joeyh 15y ago
    The naive solution to binary files is a centralized model. But here's an alternate, fully distributed implementation: http://git-annex.branchable.com/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/ 15 gb is a tiny, tiny repo. I have a 7 tb repo "here" (really, spread amoung various drives, servers, S3, etc). :)
• forrestthewoods 15y ago
  It's called Perforce and anyone dealing with binary files has been using it for years.
  • chubot 15y ago
    And also paying Perforce fistfuls of cash in licensing fees. I hear that Perforce is a quite a small company, and the founder wrote the lion's share of the code a couple decades ago. I think they are probably on par with craigslist in profits per employee (i.e. much higher than Google or Facebook. Interestingly I think Facebook has about 1/10 the employees of Google with 1/10 the profits -- off the top of my head feel free to correct -- so I don't think they blew it out of the park with their IPO filing).
    • forrestthewoods 15y ago
      Perforce is quite expensive, yes. I don't understand the rest of your comments though. I'm not sure why company size, code author, or profit margins are relevant. Perforce is used by every major gaming studio, Pixar, Nvidia, and many more. If I were to make a snarky comment it would be that Git is for poor people and Perforce is what you use when you grow up. That's not an even remotely reasonable statement, but it does have a teeny, tiny hint of truth to it. :)
      • chubot 15y ago
        I'm just pointing out the Perforce is making crazy profit, and somewhat ironically it's doing so more efficiently (I conjecture) than Facebook, which you are hearing a lot more about. Perforce is a great system, but it's showing it's age by now. I think there is probably room for someone to make another product in the high end space and make boatloads of cash from big companies, but it's not easy.
        • nfg 15y ago
          > Perforce is a great system, but it's showing it's age by now. Care to elaborate? Do you mean in terms of distributed -vs- centralised repos?