Re: how to reduce disk usage for large .git dirs?

[Roger Gammans <roger@gammascience.co.uk>]

On Thu, 2014-11-13 at 12:14 +0100, Olaf Hering wrote:
> How can I reduce the disk usage for multiple copies of the same repo?
> 
> Up to now I just made copies like this, but since .git alone is already
> 2GB it becomes expensive:
> 
>  # git clone git://host/repo.git repo-master
>  # cp -a repo-master repo-branchA
>  # cd repo-branchA
>  # git checkout -b branchA origin/branchA
>  # cd -
>  # cp -a repo-master repo-branchB
>  # cd repo-branchB
>  # git checkout -b branchB origin/branchB
>  # cd -
>  # cp -a repo-master repo-branchB-feature
>  # cd repo-branchB-feature
>  # git checkout -b branchB-feature origin/branchB
>  # cd -
> 
> 
> Since each .git is almost identical I wonder if there is a reliable way
> to "share" it. The "git clone" man page mentions --shared as a dangerous
> way to do things. It does not give an advice how to manage such cloned
> trees.

But you're not using clone you are using cp .

The clone man page also says this:-
      --local, -l
           When the repository to clone from is on a local machine, this flag bypasses the normal "Git aware" transport
           mechanism and clones the repository by making a copy of HEAD and everything under objects and refs directories. The
           files under .git/objects/ directory are hardlinked to save space when possible.

           If the repository is specified as a local path (e.g., /path/to/repo), this is the default, and --local is essentially
           a no-op. If the repository is specified as a URL, then this flag is ignored (and we never use the local
           optimizations). Specifying --no-local will override the default when /path/to/repo is given, using the regular Git
           transport instead.


Note the first sentence of the second paragraph.
 eg:
 # git clone git://host/repo.git repo-master
 # git clone repo-master repo-branchA
 # cd repo-branchA
 # git checkout -b branchA origin/branchA
 # cd -
 # git clone repo-master repo-branchB
 # cd repo-branchB
 # git checkout -b branchB origin/branchB
 # cd -
 # git clone repo-master repo-branchB-feature
 # cd repo-branchB-feature
 # git checkout -b branchB-feature origin/branchB
 # cd -

Should work better for you. And there is probably a way to do it less
commands too.

-- 
Roger Gammans <roger@gammascience.co.uk>