Reason MachinesAspen: initial public release (pre-alpha)91d98142 days agoHistory
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Limitations

Aspen is pre-alpha. This page lists what it does not do yet, so you can decide before you depend on it. The design plan records the reason behind each choice.

Not in the first release

  • Partial clones. --filter is not advertised, so git clone --filter=blob:none falls back to a full clone with a warning. A lazy fetch from an existing partial clone (it asks for single blobs) gets a clear error.
  • Exact packs for every shallow form. --depth=N (N up to 64) of a branch tip gets an exact shallow pack. --deepen, --shallow-since, --shallow-exclude, --unshallow and deeper depths are served the full history of what they ask for, with a correct shallow boundary.
  • SHA-256 repositories.
  • A web UI for browsing code, and code review or issues. Use mirror mode to keep those on GitHub or GitLab.

Known gaps

  • Tag following. git fetch does not pick up new annotated tags on its own; git fetch --tags and git clone do. Aspen does not yet record what a tag points to, which include-tag and ls-refs peeling need.
  • Force pushes and deletes need -o force, a lease or the branch-scoped URL (why). OpenAI's Git fork has a protocol extension (explicit-haves) that would make plain --force-with-lease work; Aspen does not support it.
  • SSH keys: Ed25519 and ECDSA only. RSA and security keys (sk-*) are refused (why).
  • Rate limits are per instance, kept in memory. There are no per-repository storage quotas.
  • OIDC key sets are configured, not fetched. When an issuer rotates its signing keys, update the policy.
  • Object storage backends: S3 and S3-compatible stores and the local file system. Google Cloud Storage works through its S3 API with an HMAC key; Azure Blob Storage is not supported, so the Azure module takes an S3-compatible bucket.
  • The AWS Terraform module's CDN (CloudFront in front of /-/express) has been tested with mocked providers, not yet against a real distribution. Its URLs go to Git 2.56 and later only; older clients download from the servers' /-/express.
  • Mirror mode: HTTPS upstreams only (no SSH), no Git LFS, and a first import fetches each ref separately, which is slow for tens of thousands of tags.
  • Storage overhead. Compaction keeps the packs it merges, and splitting multi-ref pushes can store an object more than once (at most twice per push). Neither has been measured on a large repository.

Not verified yet

The launch gate is the list of checks that must all pass before Aspen is called ready. Several have not been run yet, among them the differential suite against Aspen at a million operations, 24-hour chaos and fuzzing runs, the full client matrix against Aspen, a clean-account run of the Compose and AWS paths from these docs alone, and published benchmarks on identical instances.