Today, GIT-LFS was installed on the server (in the user bin) and the theme repository was re-cloned to get the lfs extension working properly. Henceforth, there should be no problem syncing the repo with binary objects added, removed or modified.
A binary copy of git-lfs was downloaded from https://git-lfs.github.com/ and installed to the user’s bin directory under ~. Following this, the theme repository had to be re-cloned because in spite of
git-lfs install
… the binary files would not be synced properly and I had a lot of problems getting things the way they were supposed to be.
The plugin repository has not yet warranted re-cloning.
Why git-lfs ?
While the server did have git installed, it was lacking git-lfs. For those unfamiliar with git-lfs, git-lfs is an extension of git which enables storing of binary objects efficiently without maintaining versioning of the binary objects (as is done for text files) and thus not bogging down the repository.
git-lfs is used for storing binary objects, primarily images in the plugin and theme repositories and since the server did not have git-lfs installed, these resources had to be synced separately, mostly by FTP. The whole point of moving to a git backed development workflow was defeated by this shortcoming.
This minor addition will, by His Divine Grace, ease the process of pushing updates to the server.
॥ श्रीमते श्रीलक्ष्मीनृसिंहपरस्मै ब्रह्मणे नमः ॥