> I think space is not a spec issue at all, an LFS server can use any deduplicating storage under the hood
The client doesn't deduplicate, so you have to download whole objects and store them. Of course you can clean up the older version of objects, but that will force you to re-download if you change branch or go back in the history.
If I have multiple copies of the same file in different subdirectories, and I need all of them for work, there's no way around storing all of them as multiple copies on my machine, right? Unless you do some symlinking or hardlinking magic, but that will likely break platform and software compatibility so I wouldn't want it to happen either...
Similar with history, how can I have my cake (not have previous versions occupy space locally) and eat it too (have them readily available locally without download)?
Or do you mean something like chunking binary files and then deduping chunks? Is it an LFS limitation, or simply that no Git LFS client/server implementation does it yet? It's still fairly new after all.
The client doesn't deduplicate, so you have to download whole objects and store them. Of course you can clean up the older version of objects, but that will force you to re-download if you change branch or go back in the history.