GitLab CEO here. It would have been nice if they would have developed this in the open, Joey from git-annex is pretty open minded, maybe we could have prevented another standard.
I would have thought that it would have been particularly important for this to have been open to review and critique from the start given GitHub's status and importance to the wider community. Heck, even Microsoft is developing new .Net components in the open.
Would have been nice to have had debate on existing solutions to weigh the pros/cons.
Thanks Rapzid, I also think that an open process would have lead to a better outcome. I hope GitHub follows up with a rationale for the points Joey mentioned in this thread.
To be honest, it doesn't look like they put much additional thought into the problem at all. git-filters are going to be the limiting factor for performance here and depending on your filesize might still cause a considerable slowdown. I would have liked to see a solution with patching git and `sendfile` myself.
