Rfcs: RFCs repo is huge (relatively speaking)

[RalfJung]

(Not sure what the right place is to report this)

I am not entirely sure what is going on, but somehow, the RFCs repo is much bigger than all other "mdBook" (and similar) repos for Rust:

268K    rust-memory-model/.git
700K    const-eval/.git
2,8M    rustc-guide/.git
3,0M    forge/.git
3,1M    nomicon/.git
5,3M    reference/.git
6,4M    this-week-in-rust/.git
9,5M    unsafe-code-guidelines/.git
14M     blog.rust-lang.org/.git
262M    rfcs/.git

Doing git pull regularly actually takes notable amounts of time here (the most recent one downloaded 50 MiB, I am happy I didn't do this while I was on mobile data).

It looks like in the gh-pages branch, every commit contains a full new copy of searchindex.js and searchindex.json, both of which are around 20 MiB uncompressed. Is there something that can be done to avoid bloating the repository?

[SimonSapin]

Maybe the history of the gh-pages branch does not need to be preserved? The build process could make an orphan commit every time and force-push it.

[Centril]

cc @carols10cents @pietroalbini