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A comment on GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support. Parent comment

Re:GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support by maegul on Friday January 20, 2023 @06:43PM (#34461843)
I recall needing/wanting to clone only a specific folder from a repo and the best solution being to use SVN. I'm pretty sure I used that trick a few times and even shared it a couple of times. Don't know if it's possible with git now, but that was how I discovered this feature and it seemed eminently useful to me at the time!
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Re:GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support by Jenk on Friday January 20, 2023 @07:14PM (#34462167)
That's called a "sparse checkout" in git-land.

https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-sparse-checkout

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Re:GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support by thayne on Friday January 20, 2023 @11:20PM (#34463854)
A sparse checkout isn't quite the same thing. It still has to clone the whole repository, it just only puts part of it in the working tree. With svn, you don't have to pull down anything for other directories. More recently, you can combine a sparse checkout with partial clone to get more similar functionality, but it isn't exactly simple.
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Re:GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support by vmiklos on Saturday January 21, 2023 @03:55AM (#34464965)
FWIW, it's called a shallow clone:

https://git-scm.com/docs/shallow

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Re:GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support by thayne on Sunday January 22, 2023 @06:00PM (#34483231)
That is yet a different concept, where it doesn't include the full history, but without a partial clone it still pulls the entire tree for the head commit.
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