Re: [PATCHv8 0/5] pathspec magic extension to search for attributes

From: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Date: May 19, 2016, 21:00 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGZ79kZvZQxPUkECupvqk0KRbq-pRK6y=GksOiYn_zz+TM=dBA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqiny9j2sc.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 11:55 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

> I think this round is 99% there.  The next step would be to answer
> "does the feature set we have here meet your needs that you wanted
> to fill with the submodule labels originally?" and I am hoping it is
> "yes".

But it's no. (...not quite / not yet)

I thought about this question since sending out the series and I think we would want to improve submodules more.

In the original patch series "submodule groups" I tried to achieve two goals:
 (A) a grouping scheme for submodules
 (B) some sort of persistent configuration for such a group

(A) will be mostly solved now by the pathspec attrs. It may be a bit confusing for users, as any other submodule related configuration is done in .gitmodules. Also when moving a submodule (changing its path on the file system, not the name in the config), any configuration still applies except for the grouping scheme, which may not match any more.

(B) requires some thought though. Here is my vision:

    1) Allow pathspecs for sparse checkout.

      I wonder if we just add support for that in .git/info-sparse-checkout
      or if we add a new file that is for pathspecs only, or we have a config
      option whether sparse-checkout follows pathspecs or gitignore patterns

    2) Teach `git clone` a new option `--sparse-checkout <pathspec>`
      When that option is set the pathspec is written into the new file from
      (1) and core.sparsecheckout is set to true

    3) Advertise to do a `git clone --sparse-checkout
:(attr:default_submodules)`

Going this way we would help making submodules not different but integrate more into other concepts of Git. As a downside this would require touching sparse checkout which may be more time consuming than just adding a `git clone --init-submodules-by-label` which stores the labels and only upddates those submodules.

Or are there other ideas how to go from here?

Thanks, Stefan

>
> Thanks.