Repo size is huge!

[rht]

For an unknown reason, the .git/ objects are huge, ~263 MB. But the files elsewhere that are not in .git/ amount to probably about ~2 MB at most. Why is this the case? It took me a while to clone the repo. Is it possible to rewrite the history of this repo to remove the huge object? I don't know what it is.

[Libbum]

It's the gh-pages branch which stores all of the documentation. We've been working on cutting it down but have not had complete success with that.

[rht]

I see. I suppose there is no way around it other than to softly warn people of the fetch size if they do normal git clone, somewhere in the readme? According to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1778088/how-do-i-clone-a-single-branch-in-git, git clone <url> --single-branch is an option.

[Datseris]

Sure, pointing to cloning master is reasonable. However I don't think the docs size can be cut down to more than what they are now, it's already pretty impressive.

[Libbum]

Not a bad idea. I'll put something similar in the Developer Documentation.

[rht]

After some discussion in projectmesa/mesa-geo#101, we concluded that example videos for Mesa-Geo can be put in a separate GH repo containing just the videos. And the tutorial can simply link to the raw files of this repo.

Maybe this method can be used to streamline the git clone command in the developer doc? This way, you can also retain the https://juliadynamics.github.io/Agents.jl URL, instead of having the GH pages under different URL.

[Datseris]

https://juliadynamics.github.io/Agents.jl/stable/devdocs/#Cloning-the-repository-1

At the moment we simply advise people that want to get into the development of Agents.jl to just do a shallow clone. All the video files are in a different branch gh-pages, so the main branch is practically just text.

I prefer this approach much more. Linking videos defies one of (my) principles of good documentation: examples must be run, not written. Letting the code put them where they should be is more future proof and will lead to less broken pages.

[rht]

I'm aware of that devdocs content, and hence I mentioned it.

At the moment we simply advise people that want to get into the development of Agents.jl to just do a shallow clone.

This is, however, a gotcha. Most other projects are cloned without the --single-branch flag, as most would expect to just do git clone. Some people might want to clone the repo without an immediate goal of contributing, so that they can read the repo code locally. And so on.

[rht]

To clarify, most people would do a vanilla git clone without --single-branch the repo immediately before anything else, because this is what is expected in most projects. And if people are cloning the repo just for reading, they wouldn't have read the developer doc in advance.

[Datseris]

Yes, of course, everything you say is valid! One has to make a decision about this trade-off: future stability of documentation and less development effort to create the docs, or the users that don't see this dev page (which is the majority) downloading a large repo.

[Datseris]

(I should say, I used to have several repos that followed this approach: upload videos elsewhere and link them. It really became a pain in the ass over time to maintain this.)