Re: Will git have a baseline feature or something alike?

From: Eyvind Bernhardsen <eyvind-git@orakel.ntnu.no>
Date: Mar 1, 2008, 17:30 UTC
Message-ID: <8384AA89-4ECF-4BB8-8A3B-6A656F2D2903@orakel.ntnu.no>
In-Reply-To: <200803011641.49874.jnareb@gmail.com>

On 1. mars. 2008, at 16.41, Jakub Narebski wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> On Sat, 1 Mar 2008, eric miao wrote:
>
>> I haven't ever used the shallow clone, but it looks still a bit  
>> different
>> from what I thought originally, say, if I download  
>> linux-2.6.24.tar.bz2
>> from kernel.org, that's about 40MB and should be a fair amount.
>> I then unpack and "git init", I expect it to recognize it's a  
>> v2.6.24,
>> and I can thereafter use "git fetch" to fetch those commits after
>> v2.6.24 from git.kernel.org. Is this possible?
>
> No, this doesn't work and couldn't work. The tarfile contains only
> _contents_ of the working directory, and perhaps commit-id, but it
> doesn't contain even shred of history. Git has no information of
> where this content is in linux kernel git history.

Okay, as a git n00b I'm probably on completely the wrong track, but if you made a git repository out of a kernel tarball (cd linux-2.6.24 && git init && git add .) and then did a shallow fetch from kernel.org into that repository, wouldn't the blobs you added get reused (assuming the tarball you downloaded was fairly recent), thus reducing the amount of data fetch has to transfer?

I'm sure you'd end up transferring more data than just a straight shallow clone, but it would be cool if that worked, and might even be useful. I'm downloading 2.6.25-rc3 now to try it out :)

Eyvind Bernhardsen