From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 20:59:31 GMT
Subject: Re: [RFC] shallow clone
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.