Re: Deleting first commits; maintaining last commits

On 2025-02-21 at 16:05:59, Emily Shaffer wrote:

The really expensive thing is fetching into a shallow clone. A simple shallow clone itself is not very expensive, and at $DAYJOB we encourage large-scale users (such as CI systems) to use shallow clones for that reason, since they're cheaper to serve than full clones, provided that they never fetch into them.

Now, I agree that the particular use case here is probably going to be fetching into a shallow clone, and that's okay if it's one particular user doing that occasionally, which it sounds like it is. It's definitely a problem if it's thousands of CI jobs, though.

It may be that a partial clone does perform better overall, but it has the downside that it effectively requires you to be online during usage, whereas a shallow clone does not. Whether that is a problem depends on your use case: for work, I am effectively always online, so that's not a problem, but for personal work, I want to be able to work on an airplane (where there may be no Internet and the Wi-Fi, if any, is very slow), in a hotel room with bad connectivity, or even on a retreat in the middle of nowhere without Internet at all.

So that's why I mentioned both: both options have some upsides and some downsides, and there's no one-size-fits-all solution.