vcs for hefty video and graphics files

[Stefan Monnier]

It would involve on any one projects something like 15 to 60 GB of
stuff to keep up with. Large numbers of images and a dozen or 2 dozen
video files. All in some stake of compression depending on the codex.

FWIW, for a VCS to do a good job on this kind of problem, you'd need
to use a representation that lends itself to it.

I.e. regardless of what you end up doing, I would recommend you contact
the mailing-list of Free Software that can do the kind of video
manipulation you want to do, and tell them that you'd need their tool to
represent a project in such a way that it has a bunch of big-files that
are almost never modified (containing "binary data" such as the source
images and audio recordings, say) along with a few other smaller files
that mostly contain instructions about how to use the big-files to
generate the desired output.

Such a representation should lead to very good support from most VCSs.
E.g. If these small files use a clean text representation, then a VCS
might even be able to do useful merges between different branches of
a project (as long as the branches share the same big-files).


Stefan

[Philippe Lhoste]

Which of the main contenders: cvs subversion mercurial git bizarre
Maybe a few more I don't know about, would be the best candidate for
the usage and user described

bizarre? Never heard of this VCS before...

Each project would only run a month or 2 months at the most and then
all but the final delivered version would be deleted. That version
might be keep for a yr or so.

Maybe it is pure heresy, but since all you want is to keep temporarily several very big
and nearly incompressible files where diffs (or deltas?) are probably not significant, I
would advance that a VCS won't be very useful here.
Advantages of VCS are (among others):
- make delta of changes to keep as little data as possible
- compress this data (?)
- keep changes indefinitely to be sure to have them when we need them
- share and merge (changes from somebody else, or you elsewhere)
Unless I missed something, these advantages doesn't seem to apply there.

Some game makers keep track of their (large) binary files, along with the rest of the
project (source code). Rarely in isolation.
Perforce and PlasticSCM both boast superior support of these files, I won't comment on
these allegations (over other VCS), just having no experience here.

Somehow, in your case, the good old way of keeping copies renamed to keep the version (or
kept in specific directories) might work for you... Perhaps along with a small text file
with comments on content of each file.

PS.: I don't see why you included Tomcat list...