Currently, SPM does a clone of the entire repo, including the full history. This is apparently intended (see https://github.com/apple/swift-package-manager/issues/5159) as preferred by GitHub, but means that larger or older repos require downloading and storing potentially hundreds of megabytes of data.
As an example, https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-ios appears to be ~415MiB via SPM. When cloned directly, the repo is ~368 MiB. Conversely, a partial clone can be as small as ~238 MiB, about 35% smaller.
In most cases, SPM will only need the specific commit for a given release, meaning the size of the clone can be significantly reduced. There should not be significant downsides to performing partial clones for these cases, since the operations performed on SPM repos are usually very limited.
See https://github.blog/2020-12-21-get-up-to-speed-with-partial-clone-and-shallow-clone/ for examples of some of the partial cloning actions supported by GitHub. In testing, there was not a significant additional saving between a blobless clone and a full shallow clone, so I would suggest that support for blobless clones would probably be the best option, since they have the fewest potential downsides.
Expected behavior
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Actual behavior
No response
Steps to reproduce
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Swift Package Manager version/commit hash
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Swift & OS version (output of swift --version && uname -a)
neonichu
commented
1 year ago
Description
Currently, SPM does a clone of the entire repo, including the full history. This is apparently intended (see https://github.com/apple/swift-package-manager/issues/5159) as preferred by GitHub, but means that larger or older repos require downloading and storing potentially hundreds of megabytes of data.
As an example, https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-ios appears to be ~415MiB via SPM. When cloned directly, the repo is ~368 MiB. Conversely, a partial clone can be as small as ~238 MiB, about 35% smaller.
In most cases, SPM will only need the specific commit for a given release, meaning the size of the clone can be significantly reduced. There should not be significant downsides to performing partial clones for these cases, since the operations performed on SPM repos are usually very limited.
See https://github.blog/2020-12-21-get-up-to-speed-with-partial-clone-and-shallow-clone/ for examples of some of the partial cloning actions supported by GitHub. In testing, there was not a significant additional saving between a blobless clone and a full shallow clone, so I would suggest that support for blobless clones would probably be the best option, since they have the fewest potential downsides.
Expected behavior
No response
Actual behavior
No response
Steps to reproduce
No response
Swift Package Manager version/commit hash
No response
Swift & OS version (output of
swift --version && uname -a)No response