Re: [RFC PATCH] upload_pack.c: make deepen-not more tree-ish

>
> Hi Andrew,
>
> On Sat, Feb 11, 2023 at 11:49 PM Andrew Wansink <andy@halogix.com> wrote:
> >
> > This unlocks `git clone --shallow-exclude=<commit-sha1>`
> >
> > git-clone only accepts --shallow-excude arguments where
> > the argument is a branch or tag because upload_pack only
> > searches deepen-not arguments for branches and tags.
> >
> > Make process_deepen_not search for commit objects if no
> > branch or tag is found then add them to the deepen_not
> > list.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Andrew Wansink <wansink@uber.com>
> > ---
> >
> > At Uber we have a lot of patches in CI simultaneously,
> > the CI jobs will frequently clone the monorepo multiple
> > times for each patch.  They do this to calculate diffs
> > between a patch and its parent commit.
> >
>
> I used to manage a CI system that support monorepo use cases not so long ago.
> We had several hosts(VM/Baremetal) on which we spin up containers for CI to run.
>
> We maintain a bare copy of the monorepo on the host level (cron job / systemd / DaemonSet) and mount this as read-only into each of the CI containers.
>
> Each of the CI containers would attempt to clone/fetch the monorepo with `--reference-if-able ./path/to/read-only-mount/repo.git` (1)
> So that most of the needed objects are already on disk in the shared bare repo.
>
>
> +-----------+  +-----------+  +-----------+
> | container |  | container |  | container |
> +-----------+  +-----------+  +-----------+
>              \       |       /
>       (mount) \      |      /
>               +------------+                 +--------+
>               | bare-repo  | <-------------- | Remote |
>               +------------+   (git-fetch)   +--------+
>                     |
>                     | (maintain)
>                     |
>               +----------+
>               | cron-job |
>               +----------+
>
> (forgive my horrible drawing)
>
> With this setup, we did not have a need to shallow clone any longer,
> and our git-clone in each container is simply a combination of git-ls-remote and a very light-weighted git-fetch.
> In some cases, such as a job in the later stages of a CI pipeline,
> the host would already download all the needed objects into the bare copy of the repository.
> This lets us skip git-fetch entirely when the CI container executes.
>
> Compared to the shallow clone approach,
> our "local cache" approach sped up the clone speed drastically
> while allowing developers to interact with git history inside tests a lot easier.
>
> > One optimisation in this flow is to clone only to a specific
> > depth, this may or may not work, depending on how old the
> > patch is.  In this case we have to --unshallow or discard
> > the shallow clone and fully clone the repo.
> >
> > This patch would allow us to clone to exactly the depth we
> > need to find a patch's parent commit.
>
> Hope it helps,
> Son Luong.
>
> (1): https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone#Documentation/git-clone.txt---reference-if-ableltrepositorygt