RE: With big repos and slower connections, git clone can be hard to work with

[<rsbecker@nexbridge.com>]

On Friday, June 7, 2024 7:28 PM, ellie wrote:
>I'm terribly sorry if this is the wrong place, but I'd like to suggest a potential issue
>with "git clone".
>
>The problem is that any sort of interruption or connection issue, no matter how
>brief, causes the clone to stop and leave nothing behind:
>
>$ git clone https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko
>Cloning into 'nheko'...
>remote: Enumerating objects: 43991, done.
>remote: Counting objects: 100% (6535/6535), done.
>remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1449/1449), done.
>error: RPC failed; curl 92 HTTP/2 stream 5 was not closed cleanly:
>CANCEL (err 8)
>error: 2771 bytes of body are still expected
>fetch-pack: unexpected disconnect while reading sideband packet
>fatal: early EOF
>fatal: fetch-pack: invalid index-pack output $ cd nheko
>bash: cd: nheko: No such file or director
>
>In my experience, this can be really impactful with 1. big repositories and 2.
>unreliable internet - which I would argue isn't unheard of! E.g.
>a developer may work via mobile connection on a business trip. The result can even
>be that a repository is uncloneable for some users!
>
>This has left me in the absurd situation where I was able to download a tarball via
>HTTPS from the git hoster just fine, even way larger binary release items, thanks to
>the browser's HTTPS resume. And yet a simple git clone of the same project failed
>repeatedly.
>
>My deepest apologies if I missed an option to fix or address this. But summed up,
>please consider making git clone recover from hiccups.
>
>Regards,
>
>Ellie
>
>PS: I've seen git hosters have apparent proxy bugs, like timing out slower git clone
>connections from the server side even if the transfer is ongoing. A git auto-resume
>would reduce the impact of that, too.

I suggest that you look into two git topics: --depth, which controls how much history is obtained in a clone, and sparse-checkout, which describes the part of the repository you will retrieve. You can prune the contents of the repository so that clone is faster, if you do not need all of the history, or all of the files. This is typically done in complex large repositories, particularly those used for production support as release repositories.
--Randall