Re: Feedback outside of the user survey

From: Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>
Date: Oct 20, 2008, 15:02 UTC
Message-ID: <48FC9D87.3010303@op5.se>
In-Reply-To: <48FC9927.5030903@jaeger.mine.nu>

Christian Jaeger wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Andreas Ericsson wrote:
>> Christian Jaeger wrote:
>>> If you really wanted, I suppose you could additionally look into 
>>> implementing a kind of shallow cloning that only copies objects over 
>>> the wire which are necessary for representing the subdirectory you're 
>>> interested in.
>>>
>>
>> So what do you do when one such commit also affects something outside
>> the subdirectory?
> 
> You haven't said what you mean with "affect".
>

I mean "how would you handle a commit (and its tree-object) that updates all Makefiles in, for example, the Linux kernel project?". Those files are spread far and wide, and you'd want that change to *your* tree, but getting it into your tree either means you need to rewrite the tree (and thereby the commit) itself to get rid of uninteresting blob's from the tree, and you'd also have to prune the tree to not reveal the directory layout of the rest of the repository.

I take it parentage could be resolved by a ridiculously large grafts-file.

What you'd end up with wouldn't be a git repository at all anymore. It would be a "stump", as it'd be missing large parts of the tree entirely. I'm unsure just how much you'd have to compute to be able to use such a stump to incorporate your changes with other users again, but I doubt it would be trivial to implement. Good thing it's not my itch, really.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231