Subject: git-clone --how-much-disk-space-will-this-cost-me? [--depth n]

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:53:42 +0800

The git-clone manpage should mention how to determine how much disk
space will be used.

You see we beginners (who haven't learned git yet, so no patches
forthcoming, thank you) are often told "Just do git-clone
git://git.example.org/bla/ to get started!". Being smart, we read up on
--depth 1 to limit potential disk occupation, but we still have no
idea of how much disk space we will need. We cant just use HEAD(1)
because this is not HTTP.

Therefore the git-clone man page, one of the main entry points for the
beginner, should say how to determine how much disk space we will need
for git-clone or git-clone --depth 1 etc.

And don't tell us to just figure it out from the progress messages
after the download begins, and hit ^C if we don't like it.

Let's take a look at those messages while were at it,
$ git-clone --depth 1 git://git.sv.gnu.org/coreutils/
Initialized empty Git repository in /usr/local/src/jidanni/coreutils/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 26240, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (14001/14001), done.
remote: Total 26240 (delta 21577), reused 15354 (delta 12095)
Receiving objects: 100% (26240/26240), 15.76 MiB | 26 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (21577/21577), done.
$ du -sh
27M  .
Nope, nowhere does it directly say "You Holmes, are in for 27
Megabytes (on your piddly modem)". There obviously is math involved to
figure it out... math!

Also add examples of how one first probes a remote tree one has been
told about, determines what parts of it he might want, and then
finally git-clones just those parts.

Also document what --depth 0 or even -1 will do.