> So ls -i should show they all share the same inode number?

It would, yes. Another useful tool here is du which by default will screen out files with duplicate inode numbers. So for an example where I have two 100M files each with multiple hard links:

  me@swann:/tmp/tmp$ ls -lhi
  total 701M
  180277 -rw-r--r-- 3 me us 100M Aug 17 13:44 zero.file
  180278 -rw-r--r-- 4 me us 100M Aug 17 13:45 zero.file.2
  180278 -rw-r--r-- 4 me us 100M Aug 17 13:45 zero.file.2.link1
  180278 -rw-r--r-- 4 me us 100M Aug 17 13:45 zero.file.2.link2
  180278 -rw-r--r-- 4 me us 100M Aug 17 13:45 zero.file.2.link3
  180277 -rw-r--r-- 3 me us 100M Aug 17 13:44 zero.file.link
  180277 -rw-r--r-- 3 me us 100M Aug 17 13:44 zero.file.link2
  me@swann:/tmp/tmp$ du -shc *
  101M    zero.file
  101M    zero.file.2
  201M    total

du does this duplicate ignorance trick across whole trees so the links do not have to be in the same directory, and you can have it scan a whole tree and it will show how much space it really taken, not how much is nominally taken. Like so:

  me@swann:/tmp/tmp$ cd ..
  me@swann:/tmp$ du -shc tmp
  201M    tmp
  201M    total

The reason I'm getting 101Mb instead of 100Mb (and 701Mb in total in ls) is that it is counting each link as taking a small amount of space, then "100MByte-plus-a-bit" is being rounded up to 101Mb (and 700-and-a-fraction rounds up to 701).

Also the number in the 3rd column of the ls output above is the number of links to the object, which can be helpful in understanding this sort of situation too.

For a large chunk of the main binaries. There are certainly some things that are split out in separate binaries and scripts.

On a Debian system, take a look at /usr/lib/git-core/ - it contains a number of additional binaries, but it's still reasonably small. And a lot of what's in there is optional functionality and stuff you can delete if you don't want it. E.g. "git-imap-send", "git-instaweb" and a bunch of other things that you may or may not care about at all.

The main stuff like "git-commit" etc. is all linked to the main binary (or not necessarily present at all, depending on your build/distro).

EDIT: I just compiled a statically linked "git" binary. Stripped it is 2.5MB. That obviously excludes the few things that are in separate binaries. Things like git-daemon weighs in at 1.7MB statically linked.

Some things, like git-imap-send, seems to be a bit tricky to build statically (git-imap-send barfs errors about libdl all over my screen, and I'm not motivated to figure out why)