Partial Hydration, Partial Nodata

[M-Pixel]

• A repository has become very large.
• I need to work with the repository on a laptop, so I need distributed, and I need to use as little disk space as I can.
• It is likely that I will want to reference recent history.  It is unlikely that I will have any need to reference ancient history.

This is a situation I've found myself in more than once before, and I'd like to find a solution.  Nodata is a good start, but not feasible.  With Nodata, I can make new commits without an internet connection, but that's it.  Better than centralized, but far from distributed. Replicating the data needed to populate all commits on the main branch is excessive, when less than half as much data could sufficiently "hydrate" the last month of commits (e.g. repo is 40gb, workspace is 5gb, there is only ~100MB increase in repo size over the past month, seems like I should be able to have 1 month of fully navigable history with only 5.1GB data).  Does anything like this exist, or am I describing functionality that would need to be added?

 

[calbzam]

Hello,

Just replicating the branches that you actually need doesn't help to reduce the size? I'm afraid that the hydration feature is not configurable to some specific changesets.

It's on our roadmap to provide a solution to reduce the Jet databases removing the old history of a repo. I guess this feature would be also useful in your scenario.

Regards,

Carlos.

 

[M-Pixel]

As long as `/main` is included, for most projects, there's very little to be saved by omitting unused branches.

Squashing old history would definitely address this pain point, moreso if it could be done per client repo, instead of forcing everybody to lose that history permanently.