lfs-upstream: clone by hand

clone of an upstream that stores files in Git LFS fails. Until git-splice supports Git LFS (#407), three commands do what it would: clone without the content, fetch the content from the upstream's LFS server, and check it out.

Output

setup.bash builds this state:

$ build_scenario scenario_lfs_upstream

GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 makes the checkout leave the files Git LFS stores as they are committed, as pointers to their content:

$ GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git splice clone "file://$UPSTREAM" vendor/a
===  vendor/a: fetching file://$UPSTREAM
ok   vendor/a: cloned 18f6ff7 from main

$ cat vendor/a/model.bin
version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1
oid sha256:824c08711f4323285490080552966d5b256f5793cd45f70ce97878b7fa81e70a
size 19

The monorepo can't be pushed like this: its LFS server would get a pointer to content nobody gave it.

$ git push -q origin main
Git LFS upload failed:
  (missing) vendor/a/model.bin (824c08711f4323285490080552966d5b256f5793cd45f70ce97878b7fa81e70a)
hint: Your push was rejected due to missing or corrupt local objects.
hint: You can disable this check with: `git config lfs.allowincompletepush true`
error: failed to push some refs to 'file://.*/monorepo\.git' (regex)
[1]

git lfs fetch downloads the content from the upstream's LFS server, for the commit clone fetched:

$ git lfs fetch "file://$UPSTREAM" "refs/splices/$(git splice key vendor/a)/heads/main"
Fetching reference refs/splices/upstream/heads/main

$ git lfs checkout vendor/a

$ cat vendor/a/model.bin
weights, version 1

Now the monorepo's push uploads the content to the monorepo's LFS server:

$ git push -q origin main

and a colleague's plain git clone of the monorepo gets the file, without git-splice:

$ git clone -q https://git.example.com/monorepo.git ../colleague && cat ../colleague/vendor/a/model.bin
weights, version 1

Output​

Output