

Well, git is for source control, not binary artefacts
Only because it is bad at binary artefacts. There’s no fundamental reason you shouldn’t be able to put them in version control.
It’s not much of an argument to say “VCSes shouldn’t be able to store binaries because they aren’t good at it”.
What are your requirements? What do you need this for?
Typically there’s a third or first party project that I want to use in my project. Sometimes I want to be able to modify it too (soft fork).
And why do you think everyone else needs the same?
Because I’ve worked in at least 3 companies who want to do this. Nobody had a good solution. I’ve talked to colleagues that also worked in other companies that wanted this. Often they come up with their own hacky solutions (git subtree, git subrepo, Google’s repo
, etc. etc. - there are at least half a dozen of these tools).
It’s quite possible you are doing it wrong.
No offence, but your instinctive defence of Git and your instant leap to “you’re holding it wrong” are a pretty dead giveaway that you haven’t stopped to think about how it could be better.
People always say this, and I have seen it happen occasionally. But in practice when it happens it’s usually fairly obvious and not that confusing (especially with
git blame
).The frustration I’ve experienced from missing comments is several orders of magnitude more than the frustration I’ve experienced from outdated comments. I think mostly this is an excuse to be lazy and not write comments at all.