Going down the rabbit hole of Git's new bundle-URI

This is a story about me trying to write up a somewhat obscure Git feature and falling down a long and winding rabbit hole that ended in the worlds tiniest patch to the Git codebase. Strap in. What is bundle-uri? This all started with me trying to figure out the state of a feature that I had heard about from GitLab's Gitaly project called bundle-uri , which allows you to, in theory, speed up a clone by downloading a cached file that seeds your project's data before doing a server CPU-intensive fetch. In a nutshell, when you clone a Git repository, the git clone command will start a conversation with the Git server you're connecting to in order to figure out what all is available on the server and what it would like to get. Most clones for a repository end up with very similar data transfer, but every single time, the git client and server are doing this (sometimes quite complex and expensive) negotiation dance. A few years ago (v2.38 in late 2022), Git gained the ability to provid ... Read full article.