Yesterday I had a long post about GIS and version control. I mentioned Git in the article saying how maybe in the future Git would work with GIS files. A couple of people mentioned an article written by Gretchen Peterson titled, “Huge increase in shareability by combining Git and QGIS”.
Gretchen does a great job showing how you can manage GIS projects with Git and I encourage everyone to read it. But keep in mind it isn’t version control how I was talking. Git doesn’t understand shapefiles and other binary GIS files. It will show that a shapefile was updated, but it won’t show what you updated in it, nor will it help reconcile updates. Gretchen is using Git to help her share projects with others which it does a great job. But it isn’t geodata version control and she outlines that clearly in the post.
We all would love to see Github support shapefiles, but I seriously doubt it will ever happen. For how you can use Github and GeoJSON files which isn’t half bad.