[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 1"""
 date="2016-05-23T18:02:11Z"
 content="""
It would be nice if git checked disk space before writing object
files. However, it unfortunatly does not do so currently, and not checking
disk space is typical of unix tools so it might be hard to convince the git
devs to add that.

git-annex has annex.diskreserve because it's dealing with so much data and
such large files that it's best to not let it fill the disk and instead
abort before it downloads too much data.

I don't see any way that git-annex can avoid git objects taking up too much
disk space, without re-implementing all of git + space checking. 

Sure, `git annex sync` could avoid pulling if annex.diskreserve was not
free, but this would not help with manual `git pull`, or `git commit`, or
`git receive-pack`, or any of the other ways objects can be added to a git
repository.

What you can do though, is set annex.diskreserve to a reasonably
large amount, so that git-annex tries to keep that much space free.
Eg, set it to at least half the current size of `du -hs .git/objects`
"""]]