Re: [PATCH] git clone depth of 0 not possible.

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 8, 2013, 17:24 UTC
Message-ID: <7vk3rnfv0f.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <50EC2DE5.2050704@googlemail.com>

Stefan Beller <stefanbeller@googlemail.com> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> On 01/08/2013 03:28 PM, Duy Nguyen wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 2:36 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>>> Speaking of --depth, I think in Git 2.0 we should fix the semantics
>>> of "deepening" done with "git fetch".
>> 
>> Speaking of 2.0, we should support depth per ref. Well we don't have
>> to wait until 2.0 because we could just add shallow2 extension to the
>> pack protocol. We should also apply depth to new refs when fetching
>> them the first time.
>
> Would this mean I could do something along?
> $ git clone --since v1.8.0 git://github.com/gitster/git.git
>
> So tags would be allowed as anchors?

As the end-user facing UI, I think it would be much easier to use for users who want to get only the recent part of history that is relevant to their development if you allowed them to ask "starting from this one, I do not care anything older than that" with such an interface. The current "count how many more generations you want" interface is crazy in that it forces you to count what you have not even seen; I suspect the only reason it was done in such a hacky manner was implementation expediency.

At the syntax level, however, I do not think we can use --since there, because the keyword has a very different meaning already.

I personally do not think "depth per ref" deserves "it would be nice to support in 2.0", let alone "2.0 *should* support", label. Some may find it an interesting mental exercise to think about corner cases it will introduce and have to deal with (e.g. you ask 100 from master and 2 from maint, but maint is behind master by less than 100---what should happen?), but I do not particularly see any practical use cases, and I highly doubt that there is much value in bringing in extra complexity such a "feature" requires to do it right.