Re: --shallow-exclude=ref -> "ambiguous deepen-not" error

From: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 17, 2025, 02:54 UTC
Message-ID: <CABPp-BFxqJt+2HbY+d_qdZ0w=UDaL_u4MzO_3cpPpArQHREBJA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20250916145032.969133-1-phahn-oss@avm.de>

On Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 7:52 AM Philipp Hahn <phahn-oss@avm.de> wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

>
> Hello Elijah,
>
> On Mon, 24 Feb 2025 at 07:27:55 -0800 Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 20, 2025 at 12:27 AM bolide2005@163.com <bolide2005@163.com> wrote:
> > > Case 2: git clone --shallow-exclude=<rev> <repo-url>
> >
> > The documentation was fixed for case 2 in 00e10e07510 ("doc: correct
> > misleading descriptions for --shallow-exclude", 2024-11-04) to point
> > out that this usage is flawed.
>
> I have searched the archive and git repository, but found no explanation, why
> that usage - shallow-exclude by REV - is considered "flawed": I understand,
> that the current implementation does not support this, but is there any
> technical reason why that is not possible or undesirable?

I'd honestly rather not touch shallow clones, I only did so because of user reports and their obvious confusion from the misleading documentation and error message that existed at the time.

Anyway, I wasn't making any judgement call on what might be a desirable implementation. I was just noting that the current implementation is guaranteed to do nothing useful with such a flag, and thus that passing such a flag with the current code is flawed, and sadly that our documentation misled users and our code gave a less than helpful error message in such cases. I fixed up the documentation and error messages to fit the current implementation.

Hope that helps clarify my intent and focus at the time.