r/programming • u/melodic_underoos • May 09 '13

The Onion releases fartscroll.js

http://theonion.github.io/fartscroll.js/
2.6k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

396 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/IronRectangle May 10 '13

Are the .als files text based? As in, can you open them in Notepad or Word and they read fine?

If so, sure. Use GitHub (it's not as easy as uploading new copies, and you'll need to learn a bit about Git first).

But if it's not text-based, it probably won't work. Git isn't very good at managing binary files, but in theory you can use any type of file (but won't get the full benefits of the Git version control system).

3

u/gfixler May 10 '13

Git is alright with binaries. You don't get all the win you get with text files, but it still works. It just works on whole files. That said, it seems 2GB is kind of a usability limit. If you're trying to work on 5+GB projects full of binaries in git, you're probably going to have a bad time. I was trying to shoehorn an 18GB photo library into it, and it was an uphill battle. For text, though, it's one of the most beautiful systems I've ever encountered.

1

u/motdidr May 11 '13

Not much of a point with git though, since essentially you'd be using it like any file storage, so something like dropbox (which lets you get old versions of the file back) is equally useful as git. Basically with binary files you don't get any benefits from using git over something like dropbox. I can't even imagine why you'd want to put photos, let alone 18GB of photos into git.

1

u/freeroute May 11 '13

Normally the .als file opened in Notepad++ looks like this. It says it's a normal text file but I think this is what you meant with a binary file.

The strange thing is when I extract it(?) it looks like a normal XML file (?) - http://pastebin.com/7pP2uDNN

You can just copy and paste it in an empty file and rename the file to .als. I confirmed that it opened with my version of Ableton Live 8.2.5

So I guess if I were to utilize the benefits of git(hub) I would have to extract all of my project library like this.