This is slowly but surely being worked on. For one, Microsoft has been upstreaming parts of their GVFS fork, if you search for "partial clone" in release notes

This is slowly but surely being worked on. For one, Microsoft has been upstreaming parts of their GVFS fork, if you search for "partial clone" in release notes since 2.16.0 (including in this one) you'll see some of that work relevant to your question. I.e. one part of this is the general ability to have partially available local history, whether it's skipping (big) blobs, some trees etc. Another effort has been the introduction of the v2 protocol to Git, which has happened recently, and is only now starting to get rolled out at various hosting providers. That in and of itself hasn't helped with this, but allows for future extensions to the protocol, such as "this is not the full data, you can find the rest at xyz". Then there's the "odb" effort, see e.g. here: https://public-inbox.org/git/20180802061505.2983-1-chriscool@tuxfamily.org/ https://public-inbox.org/git/20180802061505.2983-1-chriscool... As to your "when" question. That's not really a question anyone has the answer to. It's hard to change a piece of software used by millions when you need forward & backwards compatibility, a lot harder than e.g. one company (such as Microsoft) rolling out similar features for their internal users. But a lot of people are interested in it, and steady progress is being made towards it. It's not an area I work on (I hack on other things in git.git), but I think the above summary is somewhat fair, and hopefully it helps a bit. Note that while "large binary support" doesn't need to be synonymous with "partially downloaded history", in practice that's what most people mean and want from such a feature. So I've assumed that that's the question you asked.