Handling repositories with a very long history

Even though Git can effectively handle repositories with a long history, very old projects spanning a huge number of revisions can become a pain to clone. In many cases, you aren’t interested in ancient history and don’t want to pay the time to get all the revisions of a project and the disk space to store them. In this section, we will talk about techniques that you can use to clone truncated history, or how to make Git fast despite the long history.

For example, if you want to propose a new feature or a bug fix, you might not want to wait for the full clone to finish, which may take a while.

Editing project files online

Some Git repository hosting services, such as GitHub, offer a web-based interface to manage repositories, including in-browser file management and editing. They may even automatically create a fork of the repository so that you can write and propose changes.

But a web-based interface doesn’...