Ask HN: What's the point of Git Lfs?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21555792

by tush726 • 7 years ago

2 3 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What was the inspiration of creating git-lfs? It seems to encourage a lot of anti-patterns in teams. Why don't people who need that style of workloads use svn/perforce instead?

detaro• 7 years ago

Why isn't everyone using svn? Which of the answers to that question is invalidated by the need for large file support?

BoorishBears• 7 years ago

I wouldn't wish Perforce on anyone.

mrmrcoleman• 7 years ago

I know that it is popular in data science because they need to track more things. Because:

1. All collaboration requires that collaborators are able to recreate a shared version of reality

2. This means version controlling all the things

3. For 'normal' software teams it's often ok to do this for just code and environment, hence git + docker

4. But for data science teams they need to worry about more variables; code, environment, training + test data, hyper-parameters, summery statistics...

GitLFS allows teams to track training and test data (up to 2GB unless you run your own server IIRC) which removes a lot of the headaches around building tooling to tie all these variables together with, for example, Git + Docker + S3.

Dotscience.com is a good example of a project trying to solve this neatly.

Disclaimer: I used to work there.

Ask HN: What's the point of Git Lfs?

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