Re: Local clones aka forks disk size optimization

From: Andrew Ardill <andrew.ardill@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 15, 2012, 01:34 UTC
Message-ID: <CAH5451=Tk=zjkYbK0720VBkAA12VRCAE_Dx8bBkoXba60ho8AA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CALZVapmBM78UtjAiNm2VoeWuetCiyxN70mTxbG14SQh5a5RCeQ@mail.gmail.com>

On 15 November 2012 12:15, Javier Domingo <javierdo1@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Hi Andrew,
>
> Doing this would require I got tracked which one comes from which. So
> it would imply some logic (and db) over it. With the hardlinking way,
> it wouldn't require anything. The idea is that you don't have to do
> anything else in the server.
>
> I understand that it would be imposible to do it for windows users
> (but using cygwin), but for *nix ones yes...
> Javier Domingo

Paraphrasing from git-clone(1):

When cloning a repository, if the source repository is specified with /path/to/repo syntax, the default is to clone the repository by making a copy of HEAD and everything under objects and refs directories. The files under .git/objects/ directory are hardlinked to save space when possible. To force copying instead of hardlinking (which may be desirable if you are trying to make a back-up of your repository) --no-hardlinks can be used.

So hardlinks should be used where possible, and if they are not try upgrading Git.

I think that covers all the use cases you have?

Regards,

Andrew Ardill