Re: [PATCH] fetch-pack: always allow fetching of literal SHA1s

> Hi,
> 
> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> > Just a side question, what are the people who use this
> > feature using it for? The only thing I can think of
> > myself is some out of band ref advertisement because
> > you've got squillions of refs as a hack around git's
> > limitations in that area.
> 
> That's one use case.
> 
> Another is when you really care about the exact sha1 (for
> example because you are an automated build system and
> this is the specific sha1 you have already decided you
> want to build).
> > Are there other use-cases for this? All the commits[1]
> > that touched this feature just explain what, not why.
> 
> Similar to the build system case I described above is when
> a human has a sha1 (from a mailing list, or source
> browser, or whatever) and wants to fetch just that
> revision, with --depth=1.  You could use "git archive
> --remote", but (1) github doesn't support that and (2)
> that doesn't give you all the usual git-ish goodness.