Re: Large git repositories

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

Hello! Sorry for my late reply, I have been working on something else in the
meantime.

On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 01:31:51PM +0000, Amirouche Boubekki wrote:
> Google web fonts has droid font available in zip format via http [1],
> not sure if the link is works across updates.

Thanks, that could be interesting (assuming that zips do not contain time stamps).

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 01:33:57PM +0000, Amirouche Boubekki wrote:
> This is again regarding the issue of downloading droid font in particular.
> This can be done via github with links like the following:
> https://github.com/android/platform_frameworks_base/raw/
> feef9887e8f8eb6f64fc1b4552c02efb5755cdc1/data/fonts/DroidSans.ttf

Nice, thanks! What does the "feef..." stand for? I assumed it would be the
git commit hash, but there is none of this form. The problem here is that
we need about 20 different files for the full family including different
scripts.

On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 11:32:25AM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> skribis:
> > It looks like:
> >    --depth=1 --single-branch
> > could be useful parameters for "git clone".
> Yes, that’s what came to mind.
> If it happens to be useful, we could extend ‘git-reference’ with a list
> of extra parameters to pass to ‘git’.

Actually, I have something else in mind. Currently, we accept commit hashes
or branch/tag names. How about adding an additional parameter "branch?"
(in various places, when I looked at the code I think I understood where
and would be willing to propose a patch)? If it is set, we can directly
specify the branch/tag at clone, without the need for an additional checkout,
and could also pass the parameters "--depth=1 --single-branch".

Alternatively, we could also automatically distinguish commit hashes from
branch/tag names, for instance, by imposing that always the long commit hash
is used and assuming that a branch/tag name never equals a hexidecimal string
of the corresponding length. But I prefer the additional parameter.

In our case, we could then git clone the 1.5 GB once and for all and delete
everything outside data/fonts (and in particular the huge .git). The result
would be the source for a variety of android fonts (maybe to be placed into
font-android.scm or the like).

What do you think?

Andreas