Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] wrote:

On Wed, 27 Nov 2019, Eric Wong wrote:

quoted

The "0" is the "epoch", and larger repos have multiple epochs,
roughly 1GB each. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/ has 0..7, right now.

Okay, so how does that work, is the idea that you should graft them
together using replacement objects if you want to have the full archive?

Yes.  Except we don't actually use grafts/replace and users can
currently only clone the latest epoch of LKML.  In the future,
it should also be easy to jettison old epochs if space is
limited.

And: if I want to track the latest mails in GitGitGadget, what indication
will I have that I'll need to switch to `.../1`?

You can use the gzipped JSON grokmirror manifest at:
https://lore.kernel.org/git/manifest.js.gz

grokmirror could be a bit of a pain to install because of Python
dependencies, so periodically attempting to clone the next
numbered epoch ought to be fine, too.

I've also considered adding epoch info into
https://lore.kernel.org/git/_/text/config/raw
so shell scripters w/o JSON parsers can use "git config"