Re: With big repos and slower connections, git clone can be hard to work with

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 8, 2024, 10:38 UTC
Message-ID: <20240608103832.GE2659849@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7de78f3d-f174-4bf6-837f-9c90bf935d21@horse64.org>

On Sat, Jun 08, 2024 at 11:44:09AM +0200, ellie wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Another idea that probably is silly in some way too: couldn't after the
> first error, git automatically start over and do this whole --depth=1
> followed by --deepen... automatically? I feel like anything that wouldn't
> require knowing and manually doing that process would be an improvement for
> people affected often by this.

I'm skeptical that shallow-cloning and deepening is a good strategy in general. Serving shallow clones like this is expensive for the server, and there's more network overhead in the back-and-forth requests.

It also only slices up the repository in one dimension. There could be a single tree that's really big, or even a single blob that you can never get past.

So yes, it may work sometimes, but I don't think it's something we should codify.

-Peff