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by Game_Ender 1870 days ago
The latest version of git has a very similar feature called “partial clones” to what the author describes for Mercurial. All the data is still in your history, no extra tools are needed, but you only fetch the blobs from the server for the commits you checkout. So just like LFS larger blobs not on master are effectively free, but you still grab all the blobs for your current commit.

You need server side support, which GitHub and GitLab have, and then a special clone command:

    git clone --filter=blob:none
Some background about the feature is here: https://github.blog/2020-12-21-get-up-to-speed-with-partial-...
1 comments
brandmeyer 1870 days ago
This looks too aggressive. The nice thing about git-lfs is that only the binary file type(s) you care about are run through git-lfs. All other ordinary diffable text is treated normally.

The blobless clone is going to be ensaddening the next time that I'm examining the history of some source code when I'm hacking away without a network connection.

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Game_Ender 1870 days ago
You can mitigate a bit of this by only ignoring blobs over a certain size like "--filter=blob:limit=256k" which should allow most ordinary text files through.

In the end it's the same as LFS though in that without a network examining old commits without a network is a bummer. No free lunch here besides something a bit more complex like git-annex.

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brandmeyer 1870 days ago
Closer, but we're still relying on a proxy for the developer's intent.

The gitattributes file provides a version-controlled and review-controlled mechanism to decide exactly which objects get special treatment and which ones don't. Since its a part of the repository itself, you don't have to remind new developers to specify some unusual arguments to git at clone time to avoid a performance disaster.

> In the end it's the same as LFS though in that without a network examining old commits without a network is a bummer.

Except for a crucial detail: The tools I use to examine history are the log, diff[tool], and blame. All of those tools continue to function normally on an LFS-enabled offline clone. IIUC, `--filter=blob:none` doesn't work at all, and `--filter=blob:limit=256k` is a proxy which almost, but doesn't quite work.

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