Re: [QUESTION] Access to a huge GIT repository.

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Nov 16, 2005, 20:35 UTC
Message-ID: <7vwtj85o1y.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <46a038f90511161201h54c5fa73l20b5dcf3b5c19399@mail.gmail.com>

Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> On 11/17/05, Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> wrote:
>> The underlying network transfer program, 'git-clone-pack', can
>> be told to clone only specified branches.  If somebody is
>> interested, updating the 'git-clone' wrapper to use it should
>> not be too hard -- obviously this needs to be done for other
>> transports as well, though.
>
> cg-clone already does this.

Yes, but it can be improved. It does fetch-pack for git native transports, which means the receiving end expands the pack. I think we would either need to teach cg-clone to tell cg-fetch that it is cloning and invoke git-clone-pack, or add an optional "do not expand" option to git-fetch-pack (git-clone-pack always keeps the downloaded pack unexpanded). Huge pack transfer spends long time on the downloader side unpacking the pack.

> If you just pull tagrefs and all the objects needed for them, chances
> are you'll get the whole repo anyway ;-)

Yes, that's why we changed ls-remote to report the magic ^{} entries and it is used in cg-fetch::fetch_tags.