Re: [PATCH v2] Document the underlying protocol used by shallow repositories and --depth commands.

From: Alex Neronskiy <zakmagnus@google.com>
Date: Jun 7, 2011, 20:41 UTC
Message-ID: <loom.20110607T223406-961@post.gmane.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vzklt4c92.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster <at> pobox.com> writes:

> It seems like you posted from the news interface at gmane, and the
> annoying &nbsp; are gone now.  The patch is still linewrapped (see the
> hunk header starting with "@@ -187,26"), but this one I can fix up and
> actually take a look .

So is the one starting with "@@ -215,21 +217,65". Sorry, I failed once again. It's not cc'ed, either. I'm thinking maybe Scott Chacon also has comments, since he seems to have written the file I'm modifying?

Show 15 quoted lines

> As it is documented for the first time, we didn't have a formal
> terminology for calling these commits and it is this document's
> responsibility to come up with a good one. We have used "shallow clone"
> and "shallow history", and I agree with the use of adjective in these
> contexts, but I am not sure if it is a good idea to call the commits at
> the boundary of a shallow history "shallow"---the following sentences do
> not parse well at least for me:
> 
>     "This commit is shallow."
>     "This commit is not shallow, and it is a direct child of that commit,
>     which is shallow."
>     "That commit does not exist in this repository because it is an
>     ancestor of a shallow commit".
> 
> But it may be just me. Better wording ideas, anybody?

Yes, I see... I just transplanted the terminology that the protocol uses. When "shallow SHA" is written, it means something is at the history boundary. Then again, when "deepen d" is written, it specifies a depth and not an amount to increase depth by, so maybe the strings the protocol uses are just bad for human comprehension.