Hi fellas. This is as much of a experiment in using my newly acquired Branch account as it is asking this question :) I'm including both of you specifically – Andrei, of course I know your position on GIT and binary files, and the advantage of SVN, but I wanted to include Dave on this as well because of his GIT evangelization around the NY office :) I'm curious Dave, if you have any strong thoughts on advantage/disadvantage of GIT (specifically, around it's distributed nature) for binary files, and what you both think of the blanket caveat-less 'move to git' position that Treehouse is proposing here…

I don't have much experience working with Git and binaries, so consider this all heresay. Git doesn't handle binary's as well as SVN. Git stories is diffs as _changes in terms of lines of text files_. Binary files can't take advantage of this feature of Git. With a change on a jpeg, a user would have both iterations of that jpeg.

I'm not familiar with SVN, but let's say that SVN stores _identifiers_ of changes locally, and the iterations are stored centrally. In that circumstance, SVN has an advantage in that the iterations are stored on a server, and not on every local instance.

git-annex may be worth looking into

git-annex.branchable.com
stackoverflow.com

Funny, I'm having a hard time understanding the power of git-annex via their website. I've yet to watch their 15 minute video though… but, Dave, indeed, what you're saying is true.

The other issue with GIT & binary files is inherent to what I like most about GIT – that the *entire* repository is on your computer. If I committed a 1gb file to GIT repository, and then deleted it, no matter what, every single person will have that 1gb file on their system until the repo is deleted. With small files, this is part of the charm, but I find it to be a bit untenable with files that have changing context of relevance. In SVN, if I delete a file, that file is blown away to the ether, not wasting space on anyone's machine.

Tradeoffs.

To be clear, my stance is GIT is better for code, SVN is better for binaries (PDFs, PSDs, AIs, etc.)

I've been using Subversion for years but this year I started using Mercurial for new projects. I find the user interface of the tools much friendlier than Git.

I'm a new developer and I find learning Git easier than others. There are some really good tutorials and guides to learn Git.

gitimmersion.com
git-scm.com