Re: [PATCH 00/18] Partial clone (from clone to lazy fetch in 18 patches)

On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 10:11 PM, Jonathan Tan [off-list ref] wrote:

These patches are also available online:
https://github.com/jonathantanmy/git/commits/partialclone3

(I've announced it in another e-mail, but am now sending the patches to the
mailing list too.)

Here's an update of my work so far. Notable features:
 - These 18 patches allow a user to clone with --blob-max-bytes=<bytes>,
   creating a partial clone that is automatically configured to lazily
   fetch missing objects from the origin. The local repo also has fsck
   working offline, and GC working (albeit only on locally created
   objects).
 - Cloning and fetching is currently only able to exclude blobs by a
   size threshold, but the local repository is already capable of
   fetching missing objects of any type. For example, if a repository
   with missing trees or commits is generated by any tool (for example,
   a future version of Git), current Git with my patches will still be
   able to operate on them, automatically fetching those missing trees
   and commits when needed.
 - Missing blobs are fetched all at once during checkout.

Could you give a bit more details about the use cases this is designed for?
It seems that when people review my work they want a lot of details
about the use cases, so I guess they would also be interesting in
getting this kind of information for your work too.

Could this support users who would be interested in lazily cloning
only one kind of files, for example *.jpeg?