Re: [PATCH] RFC: git lazy clone proof-of-concept

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 15, 2008, 01:07 UTC
Message-ID: <200802150207.47095.jnareb@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LSU.1.00.0802142334480.30505@racer.site>

Dnia piątek 15. lutego 2008 00:38, Johannes Schindelin napisał:

Show 15 quoted lines

> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, 14 Feb 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:
>
>> I wonder if proper subdivision into submodules (which should
>> encourage better code by the way, see TAOUP), and perhaps
>> _partial checkouts_ wouldn't be better solution than _lazy clone_.
>> But it is nice to have long discussed about feature, even if at
>> RFC stage, but with some code. 
> 
> I think partial checkouts are wrong.  If you can work on partial 
> checkouts, chances are that what you work on should be a submodule.
> 
> Having said that, I can understand if some people do not want to have
> the hassle of test^H^H^H^Husing submodules...

IMHO there is place for submodules, there is place for partial checkouts, and perhaps there is even place for the combination of two.

For example while Documentation/ isn't a good candidate for a submodule, because as you add new feature yuou want to add to documentation, if you change some feature you want to change documentation: there are whole-tree commits which contain changes outside Documentation/. Nevertheless there are some people (technical writers) which are interested only in Documentation; perhaps only in few files there. They would want to have partial checkout, I guess.

On the other hand cgit and msysgit use submodules, and I think it is good solution. I wonder if Sourcemage Linux distro uses submodules... In the case of cgit I think having git.git or its clone/fork as submodule is a good idea, but perhaps even better would be to checkout only part of it: libgit or libgitthin

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland