Points of Failure

[burjui via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 29 July 2015 at 16:00:35 UTC, Alex Parrill wrote:
> `git clone` can take awhile with large repositories, like mono.

Also not all people have a decent Internet connection, so it's 
just impractical to wait 10 minutes just for one file. For 
example, the only option I have at home is 4 Mbit ADSL, and it 
sucks big-time these days. The general principle applies to 
everything, not only to browsing sources: the less networking you 
have to deal with, the better. So being able to view a single 
file online instead of cloning the whole repository is a win, as 
well as downloading individual packages in a package manager 
instead of downloading recent system images.

And of course, you can get a single file from a Git repository, 
*if it's explicitly enabled in there* : 
http://stackoverflow.com/a/1126333/888720
But do you really want to type something like:
$ git archive --remote=git at github.com:foo/bar.git 
--prefix=path/to/ HEAD:path/to/ |  tar xvf -
?

Obvious stuff is so obvious.