This article treats LFS unfairly. It does not in any way lock you in to GitHub; the protocol is open. The downsides of LFS are unavoidable as a Git extension. Promisors are basically the same concept as LFS, except as it's built into Git it is able to provide a better UX than is possible as an extension.

▲

andrewmcwatters 5 days ago | parent [-]

Using LFS once in a repository locks you in permanently. You actually have to delete the repository from GitHub to remove the space consumed. It’s entirely a non-starter.

Nowhere is this behavior explicitly stated.

I used to use Git LFS on GitHub to do my company’s study on GitHub statistics because we stored large compressed databases on users and repositories.

▲

throwaway290 5 days ago | parent [-]

This conflates Git and Github. Github is crap, news at 11. Git itself is fine and LFS is an extension for Git. There is nothing in LFS spec that discusses storage billing. Anyone can write a better server

▲

andrewmcwatters 5 days ago | parent [-]

It does because overwhelmingly the usage of Git is through GitHub. Everything else is practically a rounding error. So it’s incredibly helpful to know that the most popular large file retrieval extension to Git on the most popular Git host will lock you in.

▲

throwaway290 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's very bad logic. By that logic Git sucks because Github sucks. I cringe every time people conflate it and if you know better then why... Just say Github sucks instead.

▲

integralid 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>overwhelmingly the usage of Git is through GitHub. Everything else is practically a rounding error

Is that true? I used git commercially in five companies, and I never used github commercially (except as a platform for projects we opensourced).

You already depend on github if you host your project there. But you're not locked in, because you can just close your github repo and migrate somewhere else. Do I miss something?

▲

bobmcnamara 5 days ago | parent [-]

> But you're not locked in, because you can just close your github repo and migrate somewhere else.

If you used LFS, you have to fork and rewrite your repository to update the .lfsconfig backend URLs to get back to a reasonable working state.

	▲	5 days ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

▲

5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]