Re: Re: full kernel history, in patchset format

From: Christopher Li <git@chrisli.org>
Date: Apr 16, 2005, 15:44 UTC
Message-ID: <20050416154441.GA30392@64m.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050416174327.GG19099@pasky.ji.cz>

On Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 07:43:27PM +0200, Petr Baudis wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> Dear diary, on Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 07:04:31PM CEST, I got a letter
> where Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> told me that...
> > So I'd _almost_ suggest just starting from a clean slate after all.  
> > Keeping the old history around, of course, but not necessarily putting it
> > into git now. It would just force everybody who is getting used to git in 
> > the first place to work with a 3GB archive from day one, rather than 
> > getting into it a bit more gradually.
> > 
> > Comments?
> 
> FWIW, it looks pretty reasonable to me. Perhaps we should have a
> separate GIT repository with the previous history though, and in the
> first new commit the parent could point to the last commit from the
> other repository.
> 
> Just if it isn't too much work, though. :-)

I think we can make the git using stackable repository. When it fail to find an object, it will try it's to read from parent repository. It is useful to slice the history.

I can have local repository that all the new object create by me will store in my tree instead of the official one. Clean up the object in the my local tree will be much easier it only need to work on a much smaller repository. If all my change is merge to official tree, I just simply empty my local repository.

About the kernel git repository. I think it is much easier just put them in one tree. So I don't need to worry about "if I need to see pre 2.6.12, I need to do this". And the full repository need to store in the server some where any way.

However I totally agree that people should not deal with unnecessary the history when they start using the git tools. We should just make the tools by default don't download all the histories. Only get it when user specific ask for it.

Why 2.6.12-rc2? When kernel grows to 2.6.15, a new user might not even need pre 2.6.13 most of the time. If we make it very easier for people to get history if they need, it will make them less motivate to store unnecessary history locally (just in case I need it).

I think we should not advise using rsync to sync the whole git tree as way to get update. We need to get use to only have a slice of the history and get more if we needed. The server should should provide some small metadata file like the the rev-tool cache, so the SCM tools can download it to figure out what file is needed to download to get to certain revision. Instead of download the whole repository to figure out what is new.

We can even slice that metadata information to smaller pieces base on major release point.

Chris