On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > No, it's actually much deeper than that. > > To git, pure replication simply isn't an action at all, so trying to track > it would be like trying to track all the voices in my head - something > that doesn't exist. It wouldn't be "truth", it would be insanity. Another reason it's not an action at all: git in many ways does not actually care at all about the difference of a "local branch" and a "remote branch on another host". Of course there _is_ a difference, in that the remote branch has to be fetched from that other repository, but it's possible (and some of the original design came from this) to share the repository data between multiple separate repositories. They can even be on different machines, if there is a networked filesystem in between (and, unlike most systems, the git database format should even be happy about _disconnected_ networked filesystems). So git from the ground up is designed so that there is no real difference between "remote branch" and "local branch", other than simply physically where the data might be. By that token, "cloning" a repository is pretty much by definition a no-op as far as the repository contents is concerned. In fact, if you use "git clone -l -s", all the cost is just checking out the new copy (so if you add "-n" to avoid checking out the new state, you basically have a zero-cost clone). [torvalds@g5 ~]$ time git clone -n -l -s v2.6/linux empty-clone real 0m0.129s user 0m0.084s sys 0m0.048s That's it. I created a "clone" of the whole kernel repo in 0.129 seconds. Exactly because cloning doesn't actually _do_ something (of course, 0.129 seconds in git speak is pretty slow, so I suspect we are doing something stupid here with shell-script). Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: 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