I found the change in my .gitconfig coincided with an update to github for mac exactly, which is why I labeled it as such in my repo.
As to what Hawser actually is, Github for mac has it bundled at the /Applications/GitHub.app/Contents/Resources/hawser/bin/git-hawser path.
running the executable with --help=false yields:
git-hawser/0.4.0 (GitHub; darwin amd64; git 2.3.0; go 1.3)
Usage:
git-hawser [flags]
git-hawser [command]
Available Commands:
add Add an entry to .gitattributes
clean Implements the Git clean filter
env Show the current environment
init Initialize the default Git Media configuration
logs View error logs
ls-files Show information about hawser files
path Manipulate .gitattributes
push Push files to the hawser endpoint
rm Remove an entry from .gitattributes
remove Remove an entry from .gitattributes
smudge Implements the Git smudge filter
status Show information about hawser files that would be pushed
update Update local hawser configuration
version Show the version number
help [command] Help about any command
Available Flags:
--help=false: help for git-hawser
Use "git-hawser help [command]" for more information about that command.
Running strings on a few executables in GitHub.app turns up the string git-media|hawser which in addition to the usage message firmly indicates that git-hawser is a fork or reimplementation of git-media used to store large files outside of the git repo, as github has a hard 100MB file size limit. I’m testing now to see what happens if you try and upload a huge file through GitHub.app.
Turns out that GitHub.app doesn’t use git-hawser automatically when dealing with large files, but strings reveals that it does have the ability to interact with a git-hawser process.
Installing the command line tools installs the github tool and git-hawser to /usr/local/bin. Running git-hawser version -c gives:
git-hawser/0.4.0 (GitHub; darwin amd64; git 2.3.3; go 1.3)
Nothing may see Gah Lak Tus and survive!
This seems related: https://github.com/blog/1986-announcing-git-large-file-storage-lfs
And lo, hawser filters were duplicated as lfs (large-file-support):
[filter "lfs"]
clean = git lfs clean %f
smudge = git lfs smudge %f
required = true