Re: [RFC PATCH 3/3] grep: add option to ignore sparsity patterns

>
> Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 11:13 PM Matheus Tavares
> > <matheus.bernardino@usp.br> wrote:
> >>
> >> In the last commit, git-grep learned to honor sparsity patterns. For
> >> some use cases, however, it may be desirable to search outside the
> >> sparse checkout. So add the '--ignore-sparsity' option, which restores
> >> the old behavior. Also add the grep.ignoreSparsity configuration, to
> >> allow setting this behavior by default.
> >
> > Should `--ignore-sparsity` be a global git option rather than a
> > grep-specific one?  Also, should grep.ignoreSparsity rather be
> > core.ignoreSparsity or core.searchOutsideSparsePaths or something?
>
> Great question.  I think "git diff" with various options would also
> want to optionally be able to be confined within the sparse cone, or
> checking the entire world by lazily fetching outside the sparsity.
>
> > * grep, diff, log, shortlog, blame, bisect (and maybe others) all by
> > default make use of the sparsity patterns to limit their output (but
> > can all use whatever flag(s) are added here to search outside the
> > sparsity pattern cones).  This helps users feel they are in a smaller
> > repo and searching just their area of interest, and it avoids partial
> > clones downloading blobs unnecessarily.  Nice for the user, and nice
> > for the system.
>
> I am not sure which one should be the default.  From historical
> point of view that sparse stuff was done as an optimization to omit
> initial work and lazily give the whole world, I may have slight
> preference to the "we pretend that you have everything, just some
> parts may be slower to come to you" world view to be the default,
> with an option to limit the view to whatever sparsity you initially
> set up.