Re: how to reduce disk usage for large .git dirs?

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 5:03 PM, Fredrik Gustafsson [off-list ref] wrote:

Thanks for sharing your notes! A few comments:

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 04:44:57PM +0100, Olaf Hering wrote:

quoted

First clone the remote repository as usual. Then create a local branch for
each remote branch that is supposed to be worked on:
# git clone git://host/repo.git repo-master
# cd repo-master
# git checkout -b branchA origin/branchA
# git checkout -b branchB origin/branchB
# cd -

Now clone each work branch into its own directory. The work dir references the
master repo. All changes come from and go into this repo, instead of the
remote repo.
# git clone -l -b branchA repo-master repo-branchA
# git clone -l -b branchB repo-master repo-branchB

To make changs in a work dir, commit as usual. The changes will be pushed from
the work copy into the local master repo. Its required to have some other
branch than branchA active in repo-master, or push from work copy to
repo-master will fail.

That's one of the reason it's not recommended to push into a non-bare
repository. You should clone your repo-master with the --bare option to
avoid having a work dir there.

quoted

To publish the outstanding changes its required to do this from the master
repo. First checkout the work branch, then pull the local changes and finally
push them to the remote repo.
# cd repo-master
# git checkout branchA
# git pull
# git push origin branchA
# cd -

It's not. You could just add your remote repository as a remote to each
of your clones of your master repo and push directly from them. It
would be much simplier and it would allow you to directly fetch changes
from your remote into your branches as well.

(however, I'm not sure but I think, that this will slowly increase the
difference between your repositories when you develop. So that they
won't change any new data since to local clone was made).

Can you not do this much simpler with --reference? Like this:

  $ git clone --bare git://host/repo.git repo-master
  $ git clone -b branchA --reference repo-master git://host/repo.git
repo-branchA
  $ git clone -b branchB --reference repo-master git://host/repo.git
repo-branchB

All three repos now push/pull directly to/from git://host/repo.git,
but repo-branchA and repo-branchB reference objects from within the
bare repo-master. You have to make use to never delete objects from
repo-master (if those objects happen to be referenced from
repo-branchA|B). If you want to prevent the repos growing in size, you
must devise a way to add new objects into repo-master before
repo-branchA|B. (e.g. a nightly cron-job in repo-master that fetches
from origin), so that when repo-branchA|B pulls, they will find most
objects are already present in repo-master.


...Johan

-- 
Johan Herland, [off-list ref]
www.herland.net