[FrankBooth]

svn is quite over-engineered and has significantly more dependencies than git. There's no way a statically linked svn would come out smaller than git, so either you're trolling, lying, or stupid.

Besides, file sizes of statically linked version control binaries is utterly uninteresting for anyone with an ounce of sanity.

[vidarh]

> Besides, file sizes of statically linked version control binaries is utterly uninteresting for anyone with an ounce of sanity.

Unless, you, say, want to be able to use it on an embedded device for some reason, or to be able to ship it as part of some project where you have little control over what environment users might want to run it in, say for an IDE running on Android.

Or for ports to far more constrained platforms (e.g. I have a semi-working AROS port. In addition to running on more modern x86, PPC and ARM hardware, AROS can run on original Amiga's, where finding a machine that even has enough memory to load git is a challenge; bizarre edge case? Sure; doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people with edge cases like this)

There are any number of reasons why one would care about size. I wish more developers did - while my mobile devices for example (which do have git) have decent storage space, I've filled most of the 16GB and 32GB respectively of them already, and I'd rather not waste large amounts of space dragging in all kinds of dependencies on stuff that isn't strictly necessary.

That said, in this case, the core functionality of git does in fact not take all that much space.

[FrankBooth]

If you cared about binary size, you'd be using dynamic linking to avoid duplication in the first place.

[ggggit]

Maybe he cares first about portability, e.g., easily moving a binary from one BSD-based device to another. Not all devices have the same space limitations.

There might be other reasons, too. Static binaries fork faster, but this works best if they are also small enough to remain entirely in the OS's cache.

There's nothing wrong with dynamic linking per se. Nor is there anything wrong with static linking per se. ("Per se" as used here is intended to mean "in all circumstaces".) The use of one or the other is simply a choice. There are advantages and disadvantages with each method, based on the circumstances and whatever the desired result(s) is/are.

[ciupicri]

Why would/do you run git on a mobile device?

[to3m]

You could use it to automatically get firmware and software updates. One likely way of doing it: use git to list out tags and branches, find most recent one with appropriate text in the name. Then check out the data from that revision, and use it. Maybe delete the local git stuff afterwards (since you don't need it any more). Or, better yet, archive the data from that revision.

You might not necessarily supply this solution as part of a product - but if you work somewhere that has a lot of devices to manage, you might want to do this kind of thing yourself, internally. And if you're going to then take it seriously, you'd want to keep previous revisions of all your stuff around, making it easy for you to roll back to previous versions. Files with history, and easy rolling back to previous revisions... git isn't the worst possible way of doing that.

(I've seen this sort of thing done with perforce, pretty much exactly as I describe, to deliver updates of internal tools and manage test builds of products. Daily builds of tools and products get checked in to perforce each day; most days, QA test that day's build results; if a a given day's build proves not to be a big pile of crap, they tag the corresponding revision. Then you can use perforce to find half-decent historical builds, and retrieve them. The place I saw this done at had a little tool that somebody had written to put a friendly GUI face on this process.)

[ciupicri]

Isn't this a problem that should be solved with a package management solution like yum or apt-get plus something for configuration management like puppet, chef or ansible? Git would still be useful, but only on the server side.

[to3m]

Possibly. I'm thinking more of retrieving an entire image, so you could also use FTP. Anyway, this isn't really my field of expertise, I'm just foolishly throwing out a random suggestion...

[ontouchstart]

I am running git on a jailbroken 3G iPad 1 during commute. :)

[ciupicri]

Yeah, but what's the purpose? Are you editing text files (source code) on the iPad and you need to keep track of the changes?

[Sevein]

Some people do! Textastic for example seems like a nice editor and you can always plug in a keyboard in an iPad.

[ontouchstart]

Push to github :-)