Re: Doing blobless clone by default; switching between blobless, treeless and full clones by a command
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> Le 4 sept. 2025 à 05:37, Дилян Палаузов <dilyan.palauzov@aegee.org> a écrit :
>
> Hello,
>
> Rationale:
>
> The reason people execute git clone is hardly to issue immediately afterwards git log or git annotate.
Maybe for you, and maybe in many contexts, but I also frequently clone things to run various history spelunking searches on them.
> The reason for git clone is to (try changing something and then) build the software. (Provided that git manages source code.) Doing by default a reduced data download with git clone will sped up the initialization, it will save bytes in transit and reduce server load. In fact I think that by default (without extra configuration) git clone should do a reduced download (blobless) and
> git should download the other things, when asked to do so.
Absolutely not (in my opinion, :p). Not having the entire repository available except when connected to a network defeats the tremendous advantage of distributed version control. Namely, privileged forks are given status by social agreement, not technical requirement. I want the whole repository available independently.
> This default download preference should be ideally managed by an option in global gitconfig . When looking at https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config for “filter” I do not recognize anything relevant.
This seems more moderated and achievable. If you would prefer to clone less by default (I would not), go for it. I mostly don’t work with repos where this matters, though, or where git-maintenance doesn’t do most of the job I need after a 1-time setup cost.
I do chastise folks for mis-managing large binary files in history that create large blobs and clone times, though :)
Ben Knoble <ben.knoble@gmail.com>