Why is FGDATA hosted via git?

[D-ECHO]

Hi!
I was always happy to be able to download only some directories when using fgaddon/svn, but as I recently had to re-download the Models directory, I had to git clone the whole fgdata thing (approx. 1GB) instead of just the small part I needed. Why isn't FGDATA also hosted via svn? That could AFAIK make things some kind of easier...
Regards

[Thorsten]

I guess because a use case where you need just a few directories of FGData and don't just pull the update of the repository is pretty rare and prone to problems (also, the SourceForge GUI allows you to download individual files).

I can readily see that you may want to have the 777 ER but not the MiG-15bis on your harddisk, and that's going to work without problems, but if you pull just Effects/ from FGData without pulling Shaders/ (and possibly also Textures/ and Materials/ and preferences.xml) you're going to be in a lot of trouble.

See, to the degree that we can (and do) assign Effects to models, it's not even clear that 'just' updating Models/ does what you expect it to.

[D-ECHO]

Okay, I understand that my use case is rather unusual, but what would be lost/the problem if it was SVN. The thing is that I accidentally removed more from the Models than I wanted to and now I have not enough hardspace left to download all of fgdata again

[Hooray]

Agree with Thorsten - that's extremely rare, and people doing this sort of thing need to be enormously familiar with fgfs internals to make it work. This is the sort of maintenance work that people like Torsten and James have to do every once a while, and even they seem to be baffled by all those complex interdependencies, despite being among the top 5 most experienced contributors currently involved in FlightGear.

In other words, it's highly unlikely that the pain/gain is worth it, and even if we had this working right now, it would be even more unlikely that people would know how to use this sort of thing properly, it would cause tons of work around here - just imagine what partial fgdata updates have been causing here in terms of workload caused on the forum.

FlightGear is a highly monolithic application, and has been for the last 15+ years, it is only just about to become more modular, but that is causing new challenges, such as tracking dependencies between different components (think OSG, SG, FG, FGDATA, FGADDON)

[Thorsten]

The thing is that I accidentally removed more from the Models than I wanted to and now I have not enough hardspace left to download all of fgdata again

Well, if you would run FGData as a GIT repository, you could just check out whatever you deleted from the branch you want without having to download anything. So that's clearly not a use case that needs additional support.