From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:00:50 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 16/16] ls-files: add --overlay option
Message-ID: <7v7i9c6n5p.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <fcaeb9bf0809160500y4b67c621g45b0c6ddf3745a84@mail.gmail.com>

"Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy" <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:

>>  By the way, I do not see an easy way to review what paths are marked with
>>  no-checkout easily from your command set.  It might be worthwhile to add a
>>  new option that iterates over the index, finds a set of common prefixes to
>>  no-checkout entries and reports that set.
>
> What is it for? I can only think of it (actually the opposite, find a
> set of common prefixes to checkout entries) as a way to reconstruct
> narrow spec (simple rules only).

That's the list you can use as input to "find $them -type f" to see what
stale files from previous unnarrowed checkout are on the filesystem.

I agree that the opposite is also interesting and could be useful.  Only
the individual index entries remember the area the user told us to check
out, and I expect that "what's my narrow area right now?" would be a
common question users may want to ask.  A full answer can be obtained with
ls-files --narrow, but if we can summarize it into a more concise form, it
would be a useful thing to do.