From 22c44faa609d3d199f97602c0572a0be29ea3a8c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Alan Pearce
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2014 09:46:16 +0100
Subject: Add post about cloning similar repositories with git

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 content/post/git-cloning-similar-repositories.md | 19 +++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 19 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 content/post/git-cloning-similar-repositories.md

(limited to 'content/post')

diff --git a/content/post/git-cloning-similar-repositories.md b/content/post/git-cloning-similar-repositories.md
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++++
+Categories = ["Development"]
+Description = "Speed up cloning of similar git repositories"
+Tags = ["Development", "git"]
+title = "Cloning Similar Git Repositories"
+date = 2014-06-22T08:35:24Z
++++
+With multiple similar git repositories, for example where a base repository contains a framework or base system installation and other repositories are created from that repository, it's possible to save some time when cloning down another repository by using the `reference` option to [git-clone][]:
+
+	git clone git@github.com/my/repo --reference another-repo
+(Where `another-repo` points to a local version of a repository.)
+
+The reference here doesn't have to be the base repository itself, it could just be another variant of it.  The speedup can be quite dramatic if the repositories have megabytes of shared history, from minutes to seconds.
+
+On a related note, I'm surprised that [GitHub][] doesn't allow for multiple renamed forks, which would be very useful in this scenario.  [BitBucket][] does support this, however.  It even has a 'sync' button for pulling updates from the base into the child repositories, which is very useful, especially for those who prefer GUIs over CLIs.
+
+[git-clone]:https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-clone.html
+[GitHub]:https://github.com
+[BitBucket]:https://bitbucket.org/
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