Re: [RFC PATCH v3 8/8] --sparse for porcelains

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 15, 2009, 02:01 UTC
Message-ID: <7veird4yyi.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <200908142223.07994.jnareb@gmail.com>

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

>>> Hmmm... this looks like either argument for introducing --full option
>>>  to git-checkout (ignore CE_VALID bit, checkout everything, and clean
>>>  CE_VALID (?))...
>>>
>>>  ...or for going with _separate_ bit for partial checkout, like in the
>>>  very first version of this series, which otherwise functions like
>>>  CE_VALID, or is just used to mark that CE_VALID was set using sparse.

How would a separate bit help? Just like you need to clear CE_VALID bit to revert the index into a normal (or "non sparse") state somehow, you would need to have a way to clear that separate bit anyway.

A separate bit would help only if you want to handle assume-unchanged and sparse checkout independently. But my impression was that the recent lstat reduction effort addressed the issue assume-unchanged were invented to work around in the first place.

Cf. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/123218/focus=123252

There is no reason to use assume-unchanged to tell git not to lstat to see if a path is up-to-date by promising that you are not going to touch it after you checked it out.

So I do not understand why you would want a separate bit, nor why you think a separate bit would help when changing the index state from sparse to non-sparse (or vice versa).