Ok, sorry for the late reply but my internet connection died on me again
TY H-Hour. I take it that the --depth is the way to go.
I'm not sure about that read below . . .
- Does this work for both the read-only and commitable repo ? Or is there no difference ?
- Are there any disadvantages (other than not being able to bisect back to Adam&Eve) ?
According to docs the BIG drawback would be that a shallow repo (created with --depth n) is completely push disabled, both pushin from it and to it (and see link below)
But you supposedly can download the history later using additional
git fetch --depth n commands where n is the number of revs previous to the first one you have that you want to add to your repo's history (so maybe you can download the repo in 'parts')
- '--depth n' is a moving target. Can we also set depth to a certain tag, eg. 2.3 ?
Not that I know, but you can fetch a specific branch not only master (with the method using init, remote add, fetch and checkout)
- There are several variants of the depth method mentioned in the thread. It wasn't clear to me exactly which method worked best ?
Using
git clone --depth n seems to have only marginal reduction of the repo weight according to
this blog (I'll confirming that soon)
While using the method of: init the repo, add the wanted branch, fetch with
--depth n and then checkout the branch makes a BIG difference in weight (I can confirm downloading aprox. 590 mb for master a while ago using this one) (so if you are only beta testing you can get the latest rev this way)
So I question (mostly myself):
-Can you get the whole repo branch by branch using this method?
-If you can, can you fetch the diffrent branches without history and then get the history using an additional
git fetch --depth n (where n is a number that will get you the whole history)?
-Is it really needed to fetch all the branches anyway?
Besides that what about the idea in that blog entry about tarballing the repo? That would be restartable tough I don't expect it to shrink the ufoai repo by one gig.
Also can branches older than the latest release be 'hidden' fron a clone the way the data_source is? Would that reduce the download size?
I have other ideas but I have to go now, will report about the shallow cloning when its complete.