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

Hello everyone! I am Amisha, I have made some contributions to Git highlighted below,

https://lore.kernel.org/git/20260121130005.72375-1-amishhhaaaa@gmail.com/

sparse-checkout: optimize string_list construction and add tests to verify deduplication. Improve O(n^2) complexity to O(n log n) while building a sorted 'string_list' by constructing it unsorted then sorting it followed by removing duplicates.

https://lore.kernel.org/git/20260129121220.69267-1-amishhhaaaa@gmail.com/

u-string-list: add unit tests for string-list methods string-list: add string_list_sort_u() that mimics "sort -u"

[WIP] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20260221162359.43336-2-amishhhaaaa@gmail.com/

My time while contributing to this project has been very rewarding and amazing!

I am aspiring to apply for project 'Improve disk space recovery for partial clones', 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 would love to hear opinions and ideas on this!