With both obvious choices gone, the only remaining option was to reimplement Git LFS functionality from scratch. You can read more about it in this nice article, and the things explained there are just the tip of an iceberg. Furthermore, making ObjC/C interoperable with Go is really a nightmare (at least for now) and one needs to provide a lot of hooks and seemingly dirty tricks to make them work together. And as nice as it is, I don’t really “speak” that language fluently. As it turned out, git-lfs tool is written in Go. After all, I didn’t go that route with the core-git tool (deciding for libgit2 library instead), why would I ruin it now? Luckily, Git LFS is completely open sourced so I could easily take its code, modify it where necessary to make a library out of it and then link with it, right? Well, not really. If you read this blog post, you could find out I’m a huge opponent to this approach and there you can also read why. Just pack the whole Git LFS suite inside the application bundle and NSTask it for all Git LFS operations. Even though GitFinder is a sandboxed application, going that way would not technically be a problem.

So, what were the options to include Git LFS support in GitFinder? The first obvious one was to just use git-lfs tool and let it do all the necessary work. They provide just the tool, again very much like core-git does. Unfortunately, like it usually goes these days, the developers of Git LFS didn’t think in that direction.

Since it is meant to be widely used not only by end users, but also by other git clients, it would be ideal if it came accompanied by some kind of library and API, so other developers could simply link with it. Official Git LFS implementation consists of git-lfs command line tool and some accompanying files, much like the core-git does. And since it was rather significant undertaking, I thought it deserved a dedicated blog post. I don’t use Git LFS much myself, but many users finds it indispensable, so it had to make its way into GitFinder eventually. Instead, I will write in more details about what it took to get support for it into GitFinder. If you aren't familiar and you want to find out more, this quick intro video will get you started before moving to other sources available on the web. I will not spend many words on how Git LFS actually works. Since a single pointer is only a few hundreds bytes large, you can imagine immense savings in disk space for repository managed this way. When you change large binary files and commit changes, only pointers to those files will be kept in the repository. Everything else should be pushed to a remote LFS storage, provided by your git hosting server or elsewhere. The basic idea is not to keep all versions of large binary files locally in the repository, but only those you really need (currently checked-out in the working tree).

To solve this problem, some smart folks came up with, what they named, Git LFS (Large File Support). Furthermore, once you push them to a remote repository, anyone who clones it will get all those rarely used binary blobs wasting their disk space too. They just eat disk space for no good reason. And the most annoying thing is, you rarely need all those versions of huge files. Let’s not forget you can have more such files. After only a few changes to the fie, your local repository will grow madly in size. However, whenever you make a change to the video file, no matter how insignificant it is, committing that modification will put the complete large file in your repository, not just its diff. It is completely valid to have such files in your repository and track their changes. Here is an example: suppose you have a large (100 MB or so) binary file in your project, let’s say a video as a part of important presentation. Binary files are notorious for not allowing small diffs, no matter how small changes you make to them. For what it’s worth, the quirk affects other version control systems as well and it is related to binary files diffs.

No matter now good version control system git is, there is a small quirk it suffers from, ever since it was introduced.

Set my gitfinder