Re: [oll-user] Fw: Git workflow

[David W. <da...@mu...>]

From: Phil Holmes

> Urs is being somewhat pedantic.  push copies your changes to the server.
There's a difference between what I just said and what you said.  Since git
is a revision control system, it really works on the basis of changes in
revisions, rather than uploading files.  However, with files where it can't
track change (i.e. binary files), the only change it knows about is that
there's a completely new version of the file.  Therefore the whole of the
file gets pushed to the server, so in ftp terms, it would be uploaded.

> It's easier to consider this in the context of text files, where if you
change a single line, all that is pushed to github is a message saying
"hey - there's a new line 4 - here it is".<

Thanks!  I had that impression originally, and I was wondering why there
were sequences  of files (and I just copied others with my v1, v2 etc.)
All (well this bit <g>) is now clear.

Anecdote: back in the late 1980s when I worked for the UK Atomic Energy
Authority's Safety and Reliability Directorate, they got "Quality Assurance"
in a big way.   The QA procedures demanded we back up differences between
our files from one version of the software were developing to the next.    I
had no experience of this kind of incremental back-up, and distrusted it
instinctively, as a corruption error in one back-up would, as far as I could
see, mean that the entire chain was unrecoverable.  However there was some
new technology: WORM drives.   With one of these we could back up our entire
project every time, with no danger of running out of disk space.   Despite
regularly backing up all projects, I was landed on hard by our internal QA
auditors for being non-compliant.   In vain I asked how we could be
non-compliant if I could recover any version of the software on demand;  in
vain I pointed out that if they really wanted to *see* differences from one
version to the next, Mr Gates provided a very nice file-compare utility;
and in vain I explained that our backup was far more fail-safe.   I was in
deep trouble.  Which of course I ignored.  The external QA auditors, when
they arrived, were far more intelligent, and caused me no problems
whatsoever.

Dave

David Webber
Mozart Music Software
http://www.mozart.co.uk/