Re: shallow clone not very shallow due to tags

From: Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Aug 17, 2011, 14:19 UTC
Message-ID: <CAJo=hJvySfuWmz6vGUveC5KoR1NZGC4ji0saByVX40UxLqHqdg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CACsJy8CXiZ8uGruAk5XGFhY8MJsTHAPv3Mvh0euQdFE3U43MCg@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 19:49, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 12:16 AM, Shawn Pearce > Yes, I think a user
> who is making a shallow clone should only get the
>> HEAD branch to the depth specified, nothing else. If they want
>> additional branches, they should either pass them on the command line
>> to a new flag for clone, or modify their fetch configuration
>> after-the-fact and fetch those separately.
>
> I'd like maintain all refs of the repo, even though we though we only
> have objects for one branch. If I do a shallow clone and want to
> change branch, I could just list available branch locally instead of
> going to gitweb.somewhere for the branch name.
>
> Do we have someway to represent a ref placeholder?

Not currently, no. I haven't checked refs.c, but you may be able to create an empty (0 byte) ref file for each remote reference we didn't obtain. These should be ignored since they aren't a valid reference.. Though they might cause warnings to be sent to stderr on every command, since they exist in the refs directory but aren't a valid reference.

Of course a placeholder ref cannot be used as a starting point to checkout something, can it? It has no commit object available. So if you did decide to checkout a placeholder, you would need to first fetch that placeholder. So why not use git ls-remote to list the remotely available branches?

-- 
Shawn.