Re: Features from GitSurvey 2010

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 1, 2011, 21:27 UTC
Message-ID: <7vy65zzbr4.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=oTL2_ObcyKRb7bf7ZMPZoa1BU7uNH5pJRQtVC@mail.gmail.com>

Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 11:27 PM, Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:
> ...
>> I think Junio has already started thinking about this one.
>
> I need to get nd/pathspec right and implement negative pathspecs
> before returning to this feature.

I don't think we need negative pathspecs before going forward.

I wanted a unified "We have a path; is it inside this set of pathspecs?" (and its sibling, "We have a leading path and a name_entry taken from that tree; is it inside this set of pathspecs?"), and with that we can run:

	$ git clone git://k.org/pub/scm/git/git.git -- Documentation '*.sh'

that would limit the clone (not just checkout) to the given parts of the tree. By recording the pathspecs in the repository (and initially making it frozen---we can design extending the scope in later rounds), we can limit "fsck", "unpack-trees", "log", etc. all using the unified pathspec API.

We may later want to add negative or imaginary pathspecs to the mix, but as long as the unified pathspec API understands that, the narrow-clone part should be able to be unaware of that.

So I think that is (or at least _should be_ if the pathspec API is done right) pretty much orthogonal.