Comment by danudey

In their 'Git is unsuited for applications' blog post[0] they also say the following:

> We currently have to clone the whole repository just to edit translation files. That is problematic for big repositories. The repository for posthog.com for example is ~680MB in size. Even though we only need translation files which would be at max 1MB in size, we have to clone the whole repository. That is also one of the reasons why git is not used at Facebook, Google & Co which have repository sizes in the gigabytes.

I get that it can be a bit complex, but Git can handle this circumstance pretty easily if you know how (or write a script for it).

For example, cloning the GIMP repo from GitLab takes me about 56 seconds and uses up 632 MB on disk, using just `git clone <repo>`.

In comparison, running these commands:

    git clone --quiet --filter=blob:none --sparse https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp.git gimp-sparse-clone
    git -C gimp-sparse-clone sparse-checkout add po po-libgimp po-plug-ins po-python po-script-fu po-tags po-tips po-windows-installer

(You can also run `git sparse-checkout init --no-cone` and then just `git sparse-checkout add *.po` to grab every .po file in the repo and nothing else)

Takes 14 seconds on my laptop and uses 59 MB of disk space, and checks out only the specified directories and their contents.

So yeah, it's not as automatic as one might like but ship a shell script to your translators and you're good to go. The 'Git can't do X' arguments are mostly untrue; it should really be 'Getting git to do X is more complicated than I would prefer' or 'Explaining how to do X is git is a pain', both of which are legitimate complaints.

[0] https://samuelstroschein.com/blog/git-limitations/