Re: [GSOC] Discuss and Introduction: Improve disk space recovery for partial clones

From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 25, 2026, 11:49 UTC
Message-ID: <735eb76e-44a9-4f79-b769-23a3a07437ae@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAPvEtrfYtEvsxbsD2Q378R3e84DwHPPCSgaa1pQugrwchj9h8g@mail.gmail.com>

On 2/25/26 1:17 AM, Amisha Chhajed wrote:

> I am aspiring to apply for project 'Improve disk space recovery for
> partial clones',

I think this is a noble goal. Removing blobs that you don't expect to need again would be valuable.

Show 10 quoted lines

> I am aware of sparse-checkout and surrounding code while working on my
> first patch,
> hence i believe if we are in cone mode we can easily free up the space
> in partial clone
> for files outside of cone mode whenever user runs cleanup command, however
> figuring out what to free in non cone mode is a fairly new topic for
> me, i would love to have
> discussions surrounding this, i believe a lot inspiration about what
> we can clean can be
> derived from git gc and git maintenance.

I think you will have a larger impact if you focus on _old_ blobs that were maybe necessary for a previous checkout of an old commit but the paths have been updated in more recent checkouts so those blobs are unlikely to be needed again other than for history queries.

You should keep in mind that some tools automatically populate stale data (such as VS Code running 'git blame' in the background of every open file) and so you want to consider how any decision you make here may lead to _increased_ resource usage by redownloading data you removed.

These are just things to think about. It's an interesting space to help users save disk.

Thanks, -Stolee