Re: [RFC PATCH 00/12] Sparse checkout

On 7/24/08, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> wrote:

I think what Dscho is saying is simply that it's natural to put information about the currently-checked-out tree in the index, and unnatural to put it in the config.

If I switch branches, or checkout different versions, or git add, or git rm, it all affects the index, never the config. The index stores the attributes of which files are checked out, and can detect whether those files are different from before. Choosing which subtrees to check out sounds a lot more like one of those operations than it does like a configuration change.

Also, I don't know if git supports this right now, but I can imagine situations where you'd want to have more than one index (and associated working trees) sharing the exact same .git folder. It would be fine to share the config between these parallel checkouts, but you certainly couldn't share the index. And you probably wouldn't want to check out exactly the same set of subtrees in every working tree.

The information required to do a checkout is in the index. And "sparse checkout" is all about checking out :)

Have fun,

Avery