Re: [PATCH v2] checkout: add --no-widen for restoring files in sparse checkout mode

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 1, 2013, 05:12 UTC
Message-ID: <7vli92ltqp.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20130401044816.GI11704@elie.Belkin>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 20 quoted lines

> Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy wrote:
>
>> "git checkout -- <paths>" is usually used to restore all modified
>> files in <paths>. In sparse checkout mode, this command is overloaded
>> with another meaning: to add back all files in <paths> that are
>> excluded by sparse patterns.
>>
>> Add "--no-widen" option to do what normal mode does: restore all
>> modified files and nothing else.
>
> In an ideal world, I would like "git checkout --widen" to modify the
> .git/info/sparse-checkout file, to be able to do:
>
> 	git clone --sparse-checkout=Documentation git://repo.or.cz/git.git
> 	cd git
> 	git checkout --widen -- README COPYING INSTALL
>
> and hack on a tree with Documentation/, README, COPYING, and INSTALL
> present with no actual code to distract.  And "git checkout --no-widen"
> could be a way to ask to respect the existing sparse pattern.

Yeah, I think the above makes tons of sense, and --widen would be an ideal name for that optional behaviour. When you are limited by your original sparse pathspecs, that would be a way to explicitly widen the paths you interact with. In that sense, making it off by default would be a sensible thing to do. When you limited yourself to a subset of dir/, you do not want "git checkout dir/" to automatically widen it by accident.

> This patch isn't about tweaking the sparse-checkout pattern; instead,
> it's about how "git checkout" interacts with the skip-worktree bit.
> Maybe a good name would be --respect-skip-worktree?

Yeah, but when would one want to say --no-respect without widening the sparce pathspecs?