To me, Git-LFS and Git-Annex when compared to the Mercurial LargeFiles extension, are perfect examples of what's wrong with Git.<p>Mercurial's LargeFiles extension allows you to do what I would imagine, 90%+ of Git-LFS users will want to do: store some binary assets with their regular source code.<p>In Mercurial, the files get stored on the shared server, inside the .hg directory of the repo you clone. They are cached between requests client side, and it generally just works. I had to add 2 lines server side, and 5 lines client side (both times in a hgrc file) to enable and test the functionality.<p>With Git it seems very much that Git-LFS (rather than Git-Annex) is more like what I need to achieve basically the same results/workflow.<p>Oh wait, but I need a separate Git-LFS server. So, Git-LFS was created by GitHub, and they of course support Git-LFS on their servers.. But I want to manage this repo on my own machines so what can I do..<p>Oh look GitHib has a reference implementation of a standalone Git-LFS server.. Oh wait. Second sentence of the Readme is a bit ominous:<p>> It is intended to be used for testing the Git LFS client and is not in a production ready state.<p>I'm just using regular SSH access to use my Repos, can't I just access the Git-LFS file store that way? Oh. No. I have to expose a HTTP(S) server that accepts basic auth.. Oh and the Git client needs to be able to provide the Authorisation header automatically so I don't get prompted... Oh and the slightest thing can make the "automatic" mapping of URLS from repo to LFS-store not work, meaning I have to specify it manually...<p>That Git-LFS comes from GitHub and is relatively complex to setup for hosting, is likely not a coincidence. They make money offering 'easy' repo hosting. Why would they want to make it easier to setup your own repo.<p>This line from <a href="http://git-lfs.github.com" rel="nofollow">http://git-lfs.github.com</a> really takes the cake though:<p>> Work like you always do on Git—no need for additional commands, secondary storage systems<p>So you don't need a secondary storage system... you just need a HTTPS server and Username/Password authentication layer.. but that isn't a secondary system. Just like a Turducken isn't really three birds crammed into one.