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Large File Support
August 17th, 2017
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Today I had a bit of a scare when one of my git repos failed to clone from
gitlab. It gave a familiar looking malloc error and I thought I was facing
a packSize limitation. I upped my numbers and tried again and... nothing.
Was the repo corrupted on the remote after all? Horrifying idea!
I had the project checked out already on another machine, so I wasn't too
freaked out about losing everything, but I did need to get to the bottom
of this. In the end, it was sort of the packSize after all, but to a much
more extreme degree.
When we moved our work repos to gitlab, I was thrilled that I'd be on
a system that had built in large file support. I talked with our devops
and they had told me that we didn't need to do anything special to use it,
that it would just work. There was probably some communication error in
that, in retrospect. I bet the guy was imagining I was asking about extra
gitlab config, and it's true, you don't need to do anything. The same is
not true of the repo itself.
After about 20 minutes of reading up on it, I've got my repo all cleaned
up and using LFS properly. As a note to myself, and in case you find
yourself in the same rabbit hole, here's some helpful commands you'll want
to know to get going.
