Re: Suggetsions for collaboration workflows in large repos

> Le 29 mai 2026 à 12:47, Matthew Hughes <matthewhughes934@gmail.com> a écrit :
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm looking for some git workflow suggestions to help cut down on unnecessary
> fetching when working in a large repo with many (hundreds) of other devs and
> thousands of branches. Specifically, if in this repo I use the common config to
> just fetch all the remote heads:
> 
>    $ git config set remote.origin.fetch '+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*'
> 
> Then I find I get a lot of noise from the all the branches being
> created/updated/deleted as well as an increase in the size of my local repo due
> to all the objects I need to fetch across all those branches.
> 
> To clarify the general performance of git in this repo is reasonable (shoutout
> to `scalar`) but I am interested in cutting down on this fetching since when
> working in this repo I'm generally only interested in a tiny subset of all
> branches:
> 
> 1. The `main` branch (that everyone merges into)
> 2. Any of _my_ branches
> 3. Occasionally, one of my colleagues branches, so e.g. I can check out their
>   code locally to review (most reviewing I do in the web UI, this is
>   GitHub)
> 
> I have a prefix for all my branches: `mhughes-`, so to sort out just the
> first two points I can configure git to fetch `main` and references with that
> prefix:
> 
>    $ git config set --comment 'fetch main' remote.origin.fetch '+refs/heads/main:refs/remotes/origin/main'
>    $ git config set --append --comment 'fetch my branches' remote.origin.fetch '+refs/heads/mhughes-*:refs/remotes/origin/mhughes-*'
> 
> But then when I do want to check out a colleague's branch I need to explicitly
> fetch the exact ref like:
> 
>    $ git fetch origin some-colleague-branch
>    $ git checkout FETCH_HEAD -b some-colleague-branch
> 
> Which is ok (it's my current workflow), but it means I have to re-fetch the
> exact ref if I want to bring in changes that they make after my initial fetch
> 
> I could add an explicit fetch of their branch like:
> 
>    $ git config set --append remote.origin.fetch '+refs/heads/some-colleague-branch:refs/remotes/origin/some-colleague-branch'
> 
> So that each `git fetch` also brings in updates to that branch, but in the
> remote we delete branches once their changes are merged, so if I leave that
> config I'll eventually (once they merge their change and delete the branch) run
> into errors when fetching like:
> 
>    fatal: couldn't find remote ref refs/heads/some-colleague-branch
> 
> Does anyone have suggestions to make this smoother? Or alternative workflows
> for achieving this goal? I'd also be curious to hear about other approaches
> people take went working in large repos with lots of other collaborators.
> Or am I just using git wrong in a repo like this, and should adopt another
> approach?
> 
> I thought about doing something like tracking
> `refs/heads*/some-colleague-branch` from the remote, since with the wildcard
> `*` I at least won't the fatal error on the missing reference during fetch, but
> that risks my config containing an ever growing list of such wildcards, or a
> bunch of manual work occasionally cleaning up old ones (or maybe that could be
> automated).
> 
> Thanks,
> Matt