Re: reducing object store size with remote alternates or shallow clone?

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Kumar Gala <galak@kernel.crashing.org> writes:

> I'm trying to package a linux kernel source tree and would like to just
> tar up a tree with .git/.  However this is a bit problematic as the size
> of tgz is about 500M which exceeds the limit of the image I'm trying to
> produce.
>
> I was wondering if anyone had a means to reduce the size drastically.
> I'm ok if a post processing step is required to get full git support.
> One idea I had was doing a shallow clone and if there was some means to
> "reconnect" it to a full work state after the fact.

Although your message body does not state your design constraints clearly,
your subject line hints that you are fine with a solution that involves
use of remote alternates by the recipient of your tarball.

I am _guessing_ that you have a fork from some well known tree and want to
sneakernet it to your recipients (iow, they do not "git pull" from your
repository).

How about doing

    $ LINUS=git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git
    $ git fetch $LINUS
    $ git bundle create myfork.bundle HEAD..master

and sending the thing over?  The recipient would then do something like:

    $ LINUS=git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git
    $ git clone $LINUS linux
    $ cd linux
    $ git pull /tmp/myfork.bundle master