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Comment by infogulch | Hacker News Reader

My holy grail implementation would be a "partial clone" that downloads desired files like normal, but creates stubs for selected files that are not stored on the device but downloaded on-demand upon opening them, like the OneDrive Files On-Demand [1] or Google Drive File Stream.

[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/save-disk-space-w...

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Have you seen https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit? It's used by the Windows team to manage a monorepo containing most Windows source code.

Unfortunately that approach was put in maintenance mode since it didn't seem like it would be supportable on macOS.

This has been superceded by Scalar (https://github.com/microsoft/scalar) and again merged into Microsoft's fork of git (https://github.com/microsoft/git)

It supports neat stuff like partial clone which seems like a pretty big deal.

Interesting! It seems some of Scalar from late 2021 has already made it into the official git project's contrib dir [0]. It looks like Scalar is mostly an opinionated way to configure git [1] using git partial-clone among other features.

Git partial-clone looks almost perfect, except it only downloads and displays files explicitly added to the git sparse-checkout list. I want some "magic" vfs shenanigans that lets me view and browse the full repo exactly as if the full repo where checked out, but when I open a directory or file the contents are downloaded on-demand.

[0]: https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/contrib/scalar

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/git/blob/vfs-2.37.0/Documentati...

It seems win32 has specific support for this kind of tech at a couple different layers, one that's low level filesystem virtualization that's like FUSE I guess [1], and another that's higher level and exposes sync status of files via explorer and other win32 apis [2] which is what I assume OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc use.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/projfs/projec...

[2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/cfapi/build-a...

Have you looked into git-annex?

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