From: Linus Torvalds Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2005 16:51:16 GMT Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Cogito-0.12 Message-ID: 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