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by peterwaller-arm 1674 days ago
Author here, I don't currently know how this compares to git-lfs. It it is possible git-lfs would perform quite well on the same inputs as elfshaker works on. If git-lfs does already work well for your use case I'd recommend using that rather than elfshaker, as it is more established.
1 comments

Thanks for the response! I was more just curious about future possibilities vs immediate practicle use.

git-lfs just offloads the storage of the large binaries to a remote site, and then downloads on demand.

If you have a lot of binary assets like artwork or huge excel spreadsheets, it's very useful, because in those cases, without git-lfs, the git repo will get very large, git will get extremely slow, and github will get angry at you for having too large a repo.

But it's not all roses with git-lfs, since now you're reliant on the external network to do checkouts, vs having fetched everything at once w/ the initial clone, and also of course just switching between revisions can get slower since you're network-limited to fetch those large files. (And though I'm not sure, it doesn't seem like git-lfs is doing any local caching.)

So you could imagine where something like having elfshaker embedded in the repo and integrated as a checkout filter could potentially be a useful alternative. Basically an efficient way to store binaries directly in the repo.

(Maybe it would be too small a band of use cases to be practicle though? Obviously if you have lots of distinct art assets, that's just going to be big, no matter what...)