Understanding how Git LFS repository works for developers who don't have LFS extension installed

Question

As the title already says, I am interested in how would a git repository with LFS files behave for developers who don't have LFS git extension installed (cloning of affected files, committing of affected files, etc). Would it be even possible for them to clone such repository (or at least by LFS affected files)?

This article explains LFS for git in a very nice way (for beginners).

Answer 1

The technical spec is actually pretty understandable too :
https://github.com/git-lfs/git-lfs/blob/master/docs/spec.md

git lfs replaces the actual files with a text pointer tracked in the git repository :

Example of a v1 text pointer:

version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1
oid sha256:4d7a214614ab2935c943f9e0ff69d22eadbb8f32b1258daaa5e2ca24d17e2393
size 12345
(ending \n)

Someone without the lfs extension would see these files instead of the expected content, but would otherwise be able to interact with the repository.