Git or Subversion for binary files

Question

We need to save the binary files (mainly MS Word documents, from two to several megabytes) in the version control repository with more than 100 "projects". We are currently using Visual Source Safe, but there are some problems, sometimes the database crashes and access is slow.

We are considering switching to Git or Subversion, and we were wondering which one would be the best option for handling binary files.

Answer 1

Subversion, definitely. Today (2009) TortoiseSVN provides integrated navigation through the Subversion Explorer repositories and, in particular, supports distinguishing arbitrary Word documents (it defers the difference to Word itself, but this function works very well).

There is no reason why TortoiseGit cannot have the same function, but today this situation does not exist in a stable form. Fortunately, it's easy to port the Subversion repository to Git anytime in the future.

Update . As of 2011, TortoiseGit appears to have the same document management features as TortoiseSVN. However, Subversion supports advisory blocking documents so that other users are notified if they try to edit the document at the same time as someone else. As far as I know, TortoiseGit cannot support this feature due to its distributed nature of Git.

Answer 2

• Subversion attempts to automatically detect binary files (see SVN FAQs ). If this fails, you must assign them yourself (you also cannot change the SVN discovery method).

• Git does the same, and you can specify which files are automatically treated as binary files, including . gitattributes file in the source repository.

• Here is a comparison of the processing of Git and SVN binaries.

• Here is what some other members did with Git and binaries.

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

We use git for everyone. Literally. Even the share of our administrative office is stored in git (the system administrator records it every day).

This share is almost entirely binary files - text documents, quick books, etc.

We have a 100% accurate history of everything. And with random git gc it keeps repo manageable.

Also: git is very fast. . When we switched from SVN, git was 10 times faster than subversion in our usage patterns (large projects with 20,000+ files).

Answer 4

TortoiseGit supports the full git workflow for Office documents delegating diff to Office itself. It also serves as the delegation of OpenOffice formats for OpenDocument.