Hi all, in short the question of the lenghty explanation below will be: How can I create a clone of a subtree that only contains the data needed for that subtree in the .git folder.
In detail here is what I have tried already and what my setup looks like: We are having a big repository containing multiple projects (political reasons, cannot avoid having that... at least for now). While this works fine for all the developers (they just clone the big repo and get all the projects they need), we are facing problems with our continuous build system (Jenkins). Here we would like to have a job for each single project; of course WITHOUT having to clone the whole big repo for every job, as this would lead to a significant overhead on disk. After searching around for some time I basically came across four potential solutions: 1. Sparse Checkout 2. Submodules 3. Individual Repos with a manager script like repo, mr, git-status, and all the others that exist to tackle that problem 4. Subtrees The problem with 1 is, you still get to clone the whole repo (including all history), only to then checkout a part of it --> still disk overhead. As for submodules, I personally don't really like them and don't think the should be used in this case and they are kinda difficult to handle and can be fragile anyway. The additional script based solution seems kinda hacky as well, so I didn't really follow up on that too much. So my favorite solution so far is actually using git subtree, which is more or less easy (especially since the subtree branches are only used for the CI builds / in a read only way, nothing needs to be pushed back to the bigrepo). The problem is, however, when I clone the bare and then create the subtree branches in the cloned working copy and then try to clone these subtree branches only, I still seem to get the whole big history, including all the stuff outside the tree. Is there any way to avoid that and create a synthetic project history containing only data relevant for the subtree? What I did to kinda get there is more a hacky way. I create the subtree branch using: git subtree split --prefix=xyz --annotate="[xy] " --rejoin -b subtrees/xyz Then I clone that with: git clone --depth 1 --no-hardlinks file:///home/me/gitTests/subtreeRepo -b subtrees/xyz xyz So creating a shallow clone (depth 1) seems to be the only way and that also only works on the local linux machine. If I clone the same subtreeRepo branch on a remote machine I actually get the whole big pack / history with it (which I of course don't want). So what I did is I cloned the subtree branch locally and then cloned that repo from my remote Jenkins machine. While this seems to work (I haven't looked in if I'm getting the necessary change sets to send out the emails yet) it seems both, unnecessary complicated and very hacky. To sum up, let me conclude with the question from the beginning: How can I create a clone of a subtree that only contains the data needed for that subtree in the .git folder. Looking forward to your comments and ideas :) Thanks, Haasip -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Git for human beings" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/git-users/-/n5ZPYpDf4EIJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/git-users?hl=en.
