Re: [RFC] shallow clone

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Jan 31, 2006, 20:59 UTC
Message-ID: <7vr76oun9o.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <7v8xsxa70o.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

This is whacky, but another completely different strategy is to introduce remote alternates.

If you can allow objects/info/alternates to name a repository that is not on the local disk, we can set the original remote repository we "clone" from as one of the alternates, and teach read_sha1_file() to locally cache objects we read from remote alternates.

After such a "shallow clone", the user may want to prime the cache by something like:

	$ git-rev-list --objects v2.6.14..master |
          git-pack-objects --stdout >/dev/null

before going offline. Obviously you can keep the resulting pack instead of leaving things loose.

I am not seriously advocating this yet -- adding calls to http and git transfer machinery in read_sha1_file(), which is as low level as you can go, is not something I have guts to do at the moment.