Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kajika91 294 days ago
I'm using my self-hosted forgejo. I don't see any benefit of git-annex over LFS so far, I'm not even sure I could setup annex as easily.

Digging a little bit I found that git-annex is coded in haskell (not a fan) and seems to be 50% slower (expected from haskell but also only 1 source so far so not really reliable).

I don't see appeal of the complexity of the commands, they probably serve a purpose. Once you opened a .gitattributes from git-LFS you pretty much know all you need and you barely need any commands anymore.

Also I like how setting up a .gitattribute makes everything transparent the same way .gitignore works. I don't see any equivalent with git-annex.

Lastly any "tutorial" or guide about git-annex that won't show me an equivalent of 'git lfs ls-files' will definitely not appeal to me. I'm a big user of 'git status' and 'git lfs ls-files' to check/re-check everything.
4 comments
avar 294 days ago
Annex isn't slow because it's written in Haskell, it tends to be slow because of I/O and paranoia that's warranted as the default behavior in a distributed backup tool.

E.g. if you drop something it'll by default check the remotes it has access to for that content in real time, it can be many orders of magnitude faster to use --fast etc., to (somewhat unsafely) skip all that and trust whatever metadata you have a local copy of.

link
seanparsons 294 days ago
LFS and git-annex have subtly different use cases in my experience. LFS is for users developing something with git that has large files in the repo like the classic game development example. git-annex is something you'd use to keep some important stuff backed up which happens to involve large files, like a home folder with music or whatever in it. In my case I do the latter.
link
aragilar 294 days ago
What it works really well at is storing research data. LFS can't upload to arbitrary webdav/S3/sharepoint/other random cloud service.
link
stv0g 294 days ago
There is a soft-fork of Forgejo which adds support for git-annex:

https://codeberg.org/forgejo-aneksajo/forgejo-aneksajo

link
aragilar 294 days ago
How big are the repos you have? The largest git-annex repo I have is multiple TB (spread across multiple systems), with some files 10s of GB.

I'm not sure what you are doing, but from looking at the git-lfs-ls-files manpage `git annex list --in here` is likely what you want?

link