Re: efficient cloning

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Mar 21, 2006, 08:42 UTC
Message-ID: <7v4q1sgpet.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <441FB715.1000500@op5.se>

Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> That way the only extra dwimery would be to add "remotes" after
> "heads" under .git/refs and accept directory in .git/remotes/ as ref
> and tack on '/master' at the end of it as the last option to
> search. For a specific branch on an imported remote, one would have to
> say "jc/next". This means we still only handle 'master' specially so
> we don't introduce any new protected or special names.

Two things that holding me back from doing what you suggested are (1) "master" is just a convention and indeed non-negligible number of kernel.org trees have "test" and "release" instead without "master"; (2) I'd really really really want to avoid teaching get_sha1_basic() C-level about .git/remotes/$origin file, even though that function is more of a UI level than the rest of the really core C-level routines.

But if I were forced to choose between the above 2, I would probably pick defaulting to "master".

The reason I would like to avoid .git/remotes/$origin is because it is designed to be Porcelainish thing. The underlying C-level git-fetch-pack never sees it; instead the information fed to C-level is prepared by the upper layer using that file. As far as I understand, Cogito does not understand it either, except that it ships with bash completion code that reads from filenames there.