Subversion considered obsolete

"git clone --depth" has some severe drawbacks, in that you cannot push or fetch from it. So any commits you make have to be made into patches and mailed to someone with a full repo (ie, a team of developers still all need full repos to work effectively with each other).

But yes, in practice, git stores source code repos very compactly, and by doing branch operations in place (rather than using separate directory copies for each "branch"), it uses much less space per client than SVN checkouts for a busy developer. And its also *much* faster for the same reason.