Hi, one of the maintainers of Git LFS here. I'm also a Git contributor, and I don't think it's a secret or in any way shocking to most of the Git contributors that the intended purpose of the smudge/clean filter functionality in Git was to perform simpler modifications on source code.<p>However, one of the benefits to Git is that it is enormously flexible, and Git can be and is successfully leveraged to provide large file functionality using this mechanism. Before I maintained Git LFS or knew how it worked, I hypothesized that this would be the ideal mechanism to do handling of large files, so it shouldn't be surprising that the original developers decided to do so. We just need to be cognizant that as with any design, there are going to be some limitations, which is what I was mentioning in that thread.<p>As a side note, it's intentional that we don't use hard links or symlinks into the LFS storage because that makes it extremely easy to destroy or corrupt data by modifying the working tree, so Git's behavior here is actually helpful. There is copy-on-write functionality in Git LFS that can be used if your file system supports it to make the size of the repository a little less painful with large files.
Would love to hear some insights from game developers or others dealing with many binary media files. Is this what git lfs is used for or are there other popular tools in the scene?
I've personally only seen git lfs used as a bad-habit enabler (e.g. storing .dll, .so, and .exe files within a repo).<p>IMHO those artifacts should be stored elsewhere. Anyone have some better examples of how it's used?