Re: [ANNOUNCE] Cogito-0.12

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jul 10, 2005, 16:51 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0507100942020.17536@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050710134624.B3279@flint.arm.linux.org.uk>

On Sun, 10 Jul 2005, Russell King wrote:

> 
> It means that rsync --delete-after can (in theory) be used when
> making changes available to the upstream maintainer.

I'd suggest against that from a safety standpoint (no backups), but what you _can_ do is to upload only the objects I don't have.

This actually works - I already synced several weeks ago with Paul Mackerras, who had made his ppc64 git thing contain only the objects that I didn't have.

In other words, if you have my tree pointed to by GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES, and you populate your tree only with new files, you can actually upload that small "sparsely populated" tree as-is (without any of the objects that came from my tree), and I should be able to pull it as-is.

Well, at least with rsync. I think my git "pack" send/receive thing might be unhappy about a partial tree, but that's something I can fix, so if this makes it easier for people (you can create a totally new tre _really_ cheaply and also upload it and move it around very cheaply), then I'm ok with pulling from partial repositories, and I have indeed already done so in the past.

Btw, if people start doing this, then I really think we want a ".git/config" file, so that you can have different alternate object directories for different git directories without having to remember to set the environment variables all the time.

		Linus