[development] Git best practices for client codebases

[Marco Carbone]

Since a Git clone downloads the entire Drupal repository, the Drupal
codebase is no longer so lightweight (~50MB) if you are using Git,
especially as if you clone contrib module repositories as well.

With CVS, our usual practice with clients was to checkout core and contrib
using CVS, so that we can easily monitor any patches that have been applied,
so that they wouldn't be lost when updating to newer releases.  (Drush makes
this particularly easy.) This is doable with Git as well, but now there
seems to be the added cost of having to download the full repository. This
is great when doing core/contrib development, but not really necessary for
client work. This is unavoidable as far as I can tell, but I don't think I'm
satisfied with the "just use a tarball and don't hack core/contrib"
solution, especially when patches come into play.

Is there something I'm missing/not understanding here, or does one just have
to accept the price of a bigger codebase when using Git to manage
core/contrib code? Or is managing core/contrib code this way passe now that
updates can be done through the UI?

-marco****
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