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

From: Amisha Chhajed <amishhhaaaa@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 1, 2026, 15:34 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPvEtrd=tJ_QuAvyTm2cdmTevwn_Cwv0tQjVpaUzRS6dxggqJw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <735eb76e-44a9-4f79-b769-23a3a07437ae@gmail.com>

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

Thank you!

> 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.

Thank you for the insight!

Show 8 quoted lines

> 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.

I thought about making the command user-driven, which is when the user wants to free up space they can run something like 'git evict --older-than=30.days' or 'git evict --outside-cone' and such similar commands, that way they can remove exactly what they intend to remove in case of commits and blobs. I would love to hear opinions on if the command would look better like this or automatic like git maintenance, like a background task.

Thank you again, I really appreciate it.

-- 
Thanks,
Amisha