[eliomattia]

The two are not mutually exclusive, in principle. Depending on workflows, sizes, and change frequencies, each has advantages. Sparse checkouts are useful with small files that specific individuals can focus upon, among other things. This is for keeping server-side repo size small in versioning larger datasets that change daily and for avoiding the requirement to have a sparse checkout of those large datasets in workflows with incoming data, in the first place. This is an interesting use case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35763004