
Ask HN: What's the point of Git Lfs? - tush726
What was the inspiration of creating git-lfs? It seems to encourage a lot of anti-patterns in teams. Why don&#x27;t people who need that style of workloads use svn&#x2F;perforce instead?
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mrmrcoleman
I know that it is popular in data science because they need to track more
things. Because:

1\. All collaboration requires that collaborators are able to recreate a
shared version of reality

2\. This means version controlling all the things

3\. For 'normal' software teams it's often ok to do this for just code and
environment, hence git + docker

4\. But for data science teams they need to worry about more variables; code,
environment, training + test data, hyper-parameters, summery statistics...

GitLFS allows teams to track training and test data (up to 2GB unless you run
your own server IIRC) which removes a lot of the headaches around building
tooling to tie all these variables together with, for example, Git + Docker +
S3.

Dotscience.com is a good example of a project trying to solve this neatly.

Disclaimer: I used to work there.

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detaro
Why isn't everyone using svn? Which of the answers to that question is
invalidated by the need for large file support?

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BoorishBears
I wouldn't wish Perforce on anyone.

