Hi Blender Developers and Blender Documenters, Over the years SVN, has caused several headaches from server database corruptions to terrible download performance to poor branching support. I believe it is time that we migrate from SVN to Git to some of our projects, notably, the documentation project. The issue has been in the past that Git has terrible support for binary files resulting in large download and repository sizes. Over the years several hacks were made to make Git work with binary files but their implementation was poor and those projects have since died.
There is however one project that made a proper implementation and over the years has grown in both popularity and stability/reliability, this being Git Large File Support (Git + LFS). I will not go into the details of how Git + LFS works but it is described well in the video [1]. Implementation on the client-side is easy, simply make sure Git LFS is installed. Server-side implementation is a bit trickier, as there is no official implementation. Many open-source implementations exist however are documented here: [2] I have set up a test project on GitHub [3], if people want commit access for testing purpose let me know. Converting the documentation project to Git + LFS will involve converting both the main repository and the translations repository. Unflortiantly, translators will lose the ability to checkout only there languages however once implementing Weblate [4] translators will no longer directly interact with the repository. The primary focus of this is to test how well Git + LFS will work for us and the community. A goal in moving to Git + LFS is to make it easier to contribute to Blender, a couple of weeks ago I had to help two already Blender contributors learn SVN over Git. If it is a success for us and the community then efforts can be made into converting other repositories as well. For example, the main Blender translation repository, and Blender's pre-compiled libraries. A useful article I found from a game production studio that also made the switch is a very helpful and talks about why they made the switch along with the process they took. I have linked the article below [5]. 1. https://youtu.be/uLR1RNqJ1Mw 2. https://github.com/git-lfs/git-lfs/wiki/Implementations 3. https://github.com/Blendify/blender-manual 4. https://developer.blender.org/T68588 5. https://labs.karmaninteractive.com/svn-to-git-its-about-time-ae4c468549be Thanks for reading, Aaron Carlisle Project administrator for the Blender 3D Documentation Project Email: carlisle....@gmail.com _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers