In this episode I’m talking to Erik van Zeist. He’s a developer from Atlassian BitBucket, and at Git Merge this year, he shared some interesting experiments they have been making using clone bundles, which is a technique from Mercurial that will dramatically improve performance of repository cloning. Now they have also started experimenting with doing clone bundles with Git.

• Erik on twitter
• An article about clone bundles from Erik
• Mozilla on Mercurial bundles
• Mercurial bundle clone extension
• Mail to the Git mailing list on the subject

Outline:

00:01:23 Tell us about clone bundles
00:03:29 Is this a server-side or a client-side extension?
00:04:28 Are you already using it on Bitbucket?
00:04:49 What sort of resources does clone bundles save?
00:06:00 How does it work with the bundle on a CDN and subsequent changes?
00:07:13 How does Mercurial content negotiation differ from Git?
00:08:29 What else do we need to make this work?
00:10:22 How does it work on the client exactly?
00:11:01 How are you going to integrate this with main Git?
00:12:12 Could this be something that the Git client tools should provide?
00:13:55 What did the other Git contributors think about the idea?
00:15:32 Is a clone that was made using clone bundles different from a normal clone?
00:16:46 Is this for pulling or only for initial clone?
00:18:10 Anything else you want to share?
00:19:51 Outro