This idea sounds quite nice to me. That is, instead of modifying git core to support narrow/partial clone, {upload,fetch}-pack is modified to give clients enough objects of so it can reconstruct a valid tree. Users are free to do whatever they want on that tree. When they want to push changes back, Git client creates proper commit/tree objects and push. The two patches in this series allow git to send objects of a subtree to client, or just a barebone subtree without blobs. The client can rewrite commits and throw the old commits. I don't want to add much computation to server side, subtree looks like a good fit (i.e. simply prefixcmp). Sparse checkout can then be used to shape worktree if subtree is not good enough. All the hard work is at client side, and git-subtree is a good candidate. Well, the idea is inspired by recent discussions of git-subtree vs git-submodule anyway. Lazy clone does something similar. However lazy clone requires connectivity to upstream. Lazy clone also exposes a security issue, allowing client to get any object it wants. Comments? Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy (2): upload-pack: support subtree packing fetch-pack: support --subtree and --commit-subtree options builtin/fetch-pack.c | 15 +++++++++++++++ upload-pack.c | 31 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++- 2 files changed, 45 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-) -- 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