When glTF-Transform is used to process some input glTF files into an output file, it can overwrite the .bin file used by the sources, yielding them invalid.

I'm not sure if this is a fully general property or specific to some transforms; I think I hit this before with different transforms, but today I've hit this with merge:

gltf-transform bistro.gltf bistro-animations.gltf bistro-merged.gltf

... produces a valid .gltf file, but also keeps the file name for the buffer as bistro.bin, without renaming it to bistro-merged.bin instead, which clobbers the old data, makes bistro.gltf invalid as it refers to invalid offsets in the file, and doesn't present a way to recover unless the file is under source control (which it was, thankfully 😅)

This is not a problem when saving to GLB, but that embeds textures and makes the resulting file harder to hand-edit, so I often use .gltf as a destination and sometimes forget this will happen.

I'm not sure to what extent this is the workflow that people just expect: my expectations have been that when the output is foo.gltf, the output buffer will be foo.bin - that is probably unrealistic to expect if the file used multiple .bin buffers, but I'm not sure if this is an outlier. Especially for commands like merge that require an extra command line flag to produce more than one buffer in the output it feels wrong to reuse the original file name.