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Comment by jamesfmilne | Hacker News Reader

Would be nice if git could make use of this on macOS.

Each worktree I usually work on is several gigs of (mostly) identical files.

Unfortunately the source files are often deep in a compressed git pack file, so you can't de-duplicate that.

(Of course, the bigger problem is the build artefacts on each branch, which are like 12G per debug/release per product, but they often diverge for boring reasons.)

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"git worktree" shares a .git folder between multiple checkouts. You'll still have multiple files in working copy, but at least the .pack files would be shared. It is great feature, very robust, I use it all the time.

There is also ".git/objects/info/alternates", accessed via "--shared"/"--reference" option of "git clone", that allows only sharing of object storage and not branches etc... but it is has caveats, and I've only used it in some special circumstances.

Git de-duplicates everything in its store (in the .git directory) already. That's how it can store thousands of commits which are snapshots of the entire repository without eating up tons of disk space. Why do you have duplicated files in the working directory, though?

Git is a really poor fit for a project like that since it's snapshot based instead of diff based... Luckily, `git lfs` exists for working around that, I'm assuming you've already investigated that for the large artifacts?

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