[Insight-developers] git and binary files

David Cole david.cole at kitware.com
Tue Aug 31 15:14:10 EDT 2010


There was a question today on the ITK t-con about a binary file in gdcm in
the ITK.git repository.

The bottom line is:
It's nothing to worry about. Git will "do the right thing" and handle this
file and its history just fine.

Brad King and I went looking for the file, and we found that
"Utilities/gdcm/Source/DataStructureAndEncodingDefinition/gdcmCSAHeader.cxx"
is a "binary" data file because of a single binary character embedded inside
the C-style comment at the top of the file (line 78). Git has correctly
identified it as a non-text file because of this single character inside...

If somebody commits a change to this file, git will deal with diffing it and
compressing it and storing "just the delta" just fine. Although, since it is
a "binary" file, the "git diff" output is not readable as text.

Does that address the concern?

If not, it should be easy to remove the file, adjust its contents so that it
is just a text file, and then re-add it. Feel free to do whichever makes
most sense to you.

Are there other files that you were concerned with, or is this the only one?

Thanks,
David
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