Consider adding git-lfs to the images

[PlasmaHH]

Hi,

currently git is part of the images and a lot of people seem to use the images for ci/cd purposes and thus also git etc..

Now I found that in a lot of circumstances there were problems which ultimately boiled down to git-lfs not being available when people were using it.

Of course installing it in the ci/cd or or building an own image for those cases is possible too, however I would like to ask if it could be considered to install git-lfs per default in the image, as a service to all the people that use it (and often forget about it), I think it can prevent quite a few headaches in the feature...

[tianon]

Git is in the default (non-slim) variants of the images via https://hub.docker.com/_/buildpack-deps (not because we added it explicitly), so I think you'd probably be better off trying to make a case that it should be included there, but with the caveat that it's going to be a pretty high bar ("a lot of people using it" is less convincing than "this specific gem/package/module fails to install without it"). ❤️

To that end, there's some related prior discussion in:

• Install git-lfs together with git buildpack-deps#112

[PlasmaHH]

I do understand that some people may not have good experiences with git-lfs, although that might have improved over the time... the thing is, I find it being used more and more and on various platforms. github for example limits file size in the repo and you have no other choice than to use lfs. and while the argument could be made that people that use the default python image can just always install it or whatver, even though it is not part of the core functionality, it is integrated into git and a lot of common infrastructures.

Even gits own ci jobs install git lfs.

I understand that it isn't as specific as "xxx fails", however my main point is that in all the cases I have seen where something files, people realize that git lfs is missing often only after some annoying headscratching, since lfs is so integrated and smooth theses days that people forget that its working in the background.

Just the latest example for me is that I had some gitlab ci job create a private python package and it would always mess up the version number because the checked out repo was considered dirty, turned out some documentation image that nobody really cared about was in lfs.

Granted, thats not really compelling example but I live by "wherever I install git I install git-lfs too" to avoid any possibility of such headaches to occur.

Maybe we can put this issue on a pile and if enough little things add up... ;)