Re: Git commit causes data download in partial clone

From: charmocc <charmocc@proton.me>
Date: Feb 22, 2024, 19:34 UTC
Message-ID: <MIda3qF70GEKtbezTxMyZo7RrlyBmvzN8w1T28cnCro4dmTqwjhQjBe2A-PYbgS6jkkev3pzd4oxqmbOfucfifVhTRQsynmjCpbQmvPzm8k=@proton.me>
In-Reply-To: <20240220024310.GD2713741@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff thank you for taking a look at this.

On Tuesday, February 20th, 2024 at 3:43 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

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> a. Your --no-checkout skips the checkout, but it does not tell Git
> that you are fundamentally uninterested in those other paths. To do
> that, you can try the sparse-checkout mechanism. I'm not super
> familiar with the feature myself, but doing:
> 
> git clone --sparse --filter=blob:none $url nes

That's it! Now git knows exactly what I want from it. I am now able to add and commit new files and git status no longer lists any deleted paths. Also I can search for files I actually need with "git ls-files" and add them to the sparse checkout incrementally with "git sparse-checkout add". I haven't explored this feature before because because I assumed it is limited to selecting entire directory subtrees not individual files which would not help with the mentioned repo.

Show 6 quoted lines

> Do note that --sparse checks out the contents of the top-level tree
> by default. That's OK for your repo (all of the files are in the
> Named_Titles directory), but it might not be true for some other
> repos (it may also not work if your intent is to put another entry
> into Named_Titles, though it looks like you might just need to say
> "git add --sparse").

I think this could be avoided by cloning with --no-checkout, creating index with "git reset" and setting up empty sparse checkout afterwards with "git sparse-checkout set /".

Anyway it seems like with these tools I'm finally ready to tackle any huge git repo they throw at me in the future :)