I'm working with a large TFS collection (around 5GB) and I'm looking for a way to reduce the size of it on my local machine. If I were using TFS as a client I would cloak the directories I don't need. But I' using git and connecting via git-tf.
I found this article on using sparse checkout: http://jasonkarns.com/blog/subdirectory-checkouts-with-git-sparse-checkout/ and I've seen mentions around the web that git-tf handles it fine. However, I'm not clear on how the two are supposed to work together.
For example, git-tf doesn't allow me to setup a bare repo and then configure it with "add remote" so I have to download the entire TFS collection when I setup. So half-way down the article it talks about turning on sparse checkout on an existing repository. But after following the directions there is no change to my working directory. I tried deleting the directories I excluded, but then git sees the unstaged changes.
How am I supposed to setup sparse checkout w/ git-tf?
It's been awhile since this question has been posed, but with git-tf, you now can specify the --bare option with git-tf clone. This will create the contents of the .git subdirectory in the current directory so be sure to specify a .git directory in the clone command.
From there, you should be able to use the same options within git detailed in the articles you linked to in your question.