I've started new thread for lazy clone ideas, splitting from "Figured out how to get Mozilla into git" Rogan Dawes wrote: > Here's an idea. How about separating trees and commits from the actual > blobs (e.g. in separate packs)? My reasoning is that the commits and > trees should only be a small portion of the overall repository size, and > should not be that expensive to transfer. (Of course, this is only a > guess, and needs some numbers to back it up.) > > So, a shallow clone would receive all of the tree objects, and all of > the commit objects, and could then request a pack containing the blobs > represented by the current HEAD. That would be _lazy_ clone (with on-demand pack downloading from "master" full history repository), rather than shallow clone. I had an idea for having all the commit objects (without all the tree objects) below the soft-grafts line (beyond the line we cut-off full history and start being lazy). > In this way, the user has a history that will show all of the commit > messages, and would be able to see _which_ files have changed over time > e.g. gitk would still work - except for the actual file level diff, "git > log" should also still work, etc > > This would also enable other optimisations. > > For example, documentation people would only need to get the objects > under the doc/ tree, and would not need to actually check out the > source. Git could detect any actual changes by checking whether it has > the previous blob in its local repository, and whether the file exists > locally. Creating a patch would obviously require that the person checks > out the previous version, but one could theoretically commit a new blob > to a repo without having the previous one (not saying that this would be > a good idea, of course) Something akin to CVS's modules, or rather to how CVS modules can be abused? Something called, I think, partial checkout? This is a separate idea and I think worth implementing even for full repository. > This would probably require Eric Biederman's "direct access to blob" > patches, I guess, in order to be feasible. And it would need place to store URI from where to doenload objects on-demand: perhaps 'remote alternatives'? -- Jakub Narebski Warsaw, Poland ShadeHawk on #git - : send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html