You raise several good points. A couple of quick reaction:
On 2024-04-25 09:26, Simon Josefsson via Gnulib discussion list wrote:
- the gnulib git submodule is huge. Not rarely I get out of memory errors during 'git clone' in CI/CD jobs.
First I've heard of this problem (other than with Git LFS, which Gnulib doesn't use). What part of the clone operation fails? Is this server-side RAM, or client-side RAM, or something else? How much memory does 'git clone' require now for Gnulib?
Is there some way to cajole 'git clone' into using less memory, with a '--depth 1' or similar options? Cloning shallowly would clone Gnulib a lot faster, if you're cloning from a remote repository.
- we don't offer any way for people receiving tarballs to learn which gnulib git commit was used
Isn't the real problem that we don't put (for example) gzip's own commit ID into the coreutils tarball? If we did that, Gnulib's commit ID would come for free, since it can be derived from gzip's commit ID.
