A few weeks ago, Git announced support for sparse checkouts and partial clones in beta. Since reading it, I have wanted to share my thoughts with you, so that you know we don't live in isolation of what Git does, and also, that we have an opinion about it. Hence, my intention is to share what we think these new features when compared to the current Plastic SCM functionalities that we already have in production.
In short:
- The new Git features are about trying to avoid the mandatory local clones from growing too big by just cloning parts of the original repo.
- In Plastic, this has been possible for a few years already but in an even more powerful way. On top of that, the clones are not even required if you decide to work centralized.
