git archive --remote is out: gitea allows it, github 422s, gitlab 404s. Partial
clone with --filter=blob:none --depth=1 --no-checkout is uniform across gitea,
github and gitlab, and lists homelab-cluster's six published documents over ssh in
under a second — the list I could not get this morning. REST would be three URL
shapes, three JSON shapes and three auth schemes, and it 404s on the private repo,
which is the case that matters.
Corrects my claim that git collapses the auth section. It does not: list goes over
git, but add and check still want HTTP, because a 304 is a few hundred bytes and a
partial clone is 124KB, so checking eight externals over git costs a megabyte to
learn nothing. Private raw HTTP needs a token. Two credentials per host, not one.
The argument for git is consistency, not thrift, and that argument stands alone.
Records the failure mode: --filter is a server capability and git's fallback is
silent, so detect the warning rather than letting list become a full clone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018UTxuSizozEA8yDitPuris
jeffryandClaude Opus 5
aa20eaff89