git-clone --how-much-disk-space-will-this-cost-me? [--depth n]

The git-clone manpage should mention how to determine how much disk space will be used.

You see we beginners (who haven't learned git yet, so no patches forthcoming, thank you) are often told "Just do git-clone git://git.example.org/bla/ to get started!". Being smart, we read up on --depth 1 to limit potential disk occupation, but we still have no idea of how much disk space we will need. We cant just use HEAD(1) because this is not HTTP.

Therefore the git-clone man page, one of the main entry points for the beginner, should say how to determine how much disk space we will need for git-clone or git-clone --depth 1 etc.

And don't tell us to just figure it out from the progress messages after the download begins, and hit ^C if we don't like it.

Let's take a look at those messages while were at it, $ git-clone --depth 1 git://git.sv.gnu.org/coreutils/ Initialized empty Git repository in /usr/local/src/jidanni/coreutils/.git/ remote: Counting objects: 26240, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (14001/14001), done. remote: Total 26240 (delta 21577), reused 15354 (delta 12095) Receiving objects: 100% (26240/26240), 15.76 MiB | 26 KiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (21577/21577), done. $ du -sh 27M . Nope, nowhere does it directly say "You Holmes, are in for 27 Megabytes (on your piddly modem)". There obviously is math involved to figure it out... math!

Also add examples of how one first probes a remote tree one has been told about, determines what parts of it he might want, and then finally git-clones just those parts.

Also document what --depth 0 or even -1 will do.