Re: shallow clone not very shallow due to tags

> On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 07:03, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 6:58 AM, Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org> 
>> wrote:
>>> Uhm. That is not a very shallow clone. The clone copied 20234 objects
>>> at 9.15 MiB... so its ~20 MiB lighter than a full clone. But nearly
>>> all of the tags exist, because the clone client is declaring want
>>> lines for them, making the server generate up to 1 commit back from
>>> the wanted tag. I know shallow support is the feature nobody wants to
>>> think about, but this just seems broken to me. Clients performing a
>>> shallow clone shouldn't be asking for tags... but they should be using
>>> the include-tag protocol option so that if they do happen to receive a
>>> tagged commit, the tag object will also be sent.
>>
>> The same would apply if the repo in question has many branches. Should
>> we fetch only master (or a user-specified set of refs) in shallow
>> clone?
>
> Yes, I think a user who is making a shallow clone should only get the
> HEAD branch to the depth specified, nothing else. If they want
> additional branches, they should either pass them on the command line
> to a new flag for clone, or modify their fetch configuration
> after-the-fact and fetch those separately.
>
> From what I can gather from some users I have talked to, the primary
> usage of shallow clone is to try and (sort of) quickly grab a branch,
> make a change, and post that change to the maintainers for review and
> acceptance. E.g. correcting a spelling typo. Relatively simple changes
> that can be built on a specific branch, and don't really require all
> of the history.
>
> And if a repository does have more than one branch, but is shallow
> cloned at say depth of 1, the user probably doesn't get the merge
> bases between them, so the value of the other branches is greatly
> reduced. You can't make a merge between these, and a new developer
> getting involved in the project cannot see how the branches relate to
> each other. So there isn't a lot of value in sucking down those
> additional branches during clone.
>