[Nix-dev] Fetching only a small part of a huge git repository

[zimbatm]

It really only depends if github allows to archive subsets of a repo. Did
you try to look at the API yet?

On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, 22:25 Martijn Vermaat, <martijn at vermaat.name> wrote:

> Doesn't look like anything like this has been implemented. The
> fetchFromGitHub (or fetchgit actually) machinery is here:
>
> https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/build-support/fetchgit
>
>
>
>
>
> 2016-07-19 16:52 GMT-04:00 Michiel Leenaars <ml.software at leenaa.rs>:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I was wondering if there is a recommended way to retrieve only a certain
>> path (or a set of paths) from a git repository as a source for a Nix
>> closure? The use case is working with a repository that is huge but only
>> a single
>> small folder is needed (a practical example is Google fonts on Github -
>> hundreds of Mb which is a bit much to store if all that is needed is a
>> single font such
>> as the Roboto font which is the default font of Android). fetchFromGitHub
>> and fetchgit seem to always copy the entire repository.
>>
>> git has an option for this (git archive, [1]) which seems to do exactly
>> what
>> I want - a checkout of only a single folder of a larger git repository -
>> and there are other options like a filter branch or a sparse-checkout.
>> I've grepped nixpkgs to see if there was any usage of git archive but
>> could not find it - as a user I would probably like to see something in
>> fetchFromGitHub with something like:
>>
>>  url = fetchFromGitHub {
>>    owner = "name";
>>    repo = "reallyhugerepo";
>>    rev = "revisionnumber";
>>    paths = [ "tinypath-a" "path-b" ];
>>    sha256 =
>> "22bfd184608ca00e38515c8d5d01d38460a66a503c75a35d0fea3e33559bb3b6"    };
>>
>> That seems like a reasonable and declarative way to specify what can be
>> discarded (a path in git archive can be a file or a folder with all the
>> files in it btw).
>>
>> Probably I'm not the first to think he needs this, and perhaps such a
>> thing is currently already possible? If so, I'd love any pointers ... If
>> this
>> is a bad or redundant idea, please also let me know ...
>>
>> Best,
>> Michiel
>>
>> [1] https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-archive.html
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