Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
Rogan Dawes <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jakub Narebski wrote:
"Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Filippo Zangheri <filippo.zangheri@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is it possible to git-fetch only a portion of the tree
of the specified repository, say, fetch only one directory or a
subset of files matching some regular expression?
The problem is twofold, as far as I understand it. First, what to do
if there is merge conflicts outside checked out (selected) directory?
This is something that has been repeated many times, and I fail to see
how it can be an issue. How can there be a conflict in a directory that
is not, and never has been, checked out, and therefore cannot have been
modified?
Given two branches:
code
docs
and the code people checkout the "src/" subdirectory and the docs
people checkout the "Documentation/" subdirectory, and they *only*
every work in that subdirectory, things are fine.
Until one day some developer also checks out "Documentation/" and
fixes something in the documentation as part of the same commit
that makes a code change. The push this to the code branch.
Someday in the future a documentation writer merges the code branch
over to the docs branch, "just keeping it current".
Now there arises a possiblity of a merge conflict in a part of the
tree that you do not have checked out.
If you want to say "don't ever modify stuff outside of your branch's
purpose" then why aren't you just using submodules (one for docs and
one for code) and using a supermodule to tie everything together into
a "release package"?
Ok, fair enough. Thanks for the example.
I think that one should not *expect* to be able to complete merges with
only a partial checkout, though. It *may* work in cases where there are
no conflicts, but I think it would be a perfectly valid error path to
fail if there is a conflicting merge in a part of the tree that has not
been checked out.
So, for a user working on partial trees, they would be able to modify
their partial tree, and check in their changes, but merges would have to
be done by someone with a complete checkout. For the given examples
where partial trees make sense (documentation workers), this seems like
a reasonable compromise.
Second, how to make repository contain only relevant objects: git in
many places assumes full connectivity, and that if it has an object it
hass all objects depending on it.
Yes, this is the big problem as I see it.
This is easy enough that if the above problem could be resolved
sufficiently to the git gurus' satisfaction you would be able
to get some advice on how to solve it. Its not difficult, just
damn annoying. We already do it (to some extent) with grafts and
shallow clones.
How's my suggestion above?
Rogan
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