Re: [QUESTION] Selective fetch possible?

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 10, 2008, 23:34 UTC
Message-ID: <m3d4q2ywyx.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <20080310225302.GE8410@spearce.org>

"Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> writes:

Show 20 quoted lines

> Filippo Zangheri <filippo.zangheri@yahoo.it> wrote:
> >
> > Is it possible to git-fetch only a portion of the tree
> > of the specified repository, say, fetch only one directory or a
> > subset of files matching some regular expression? This is currently
> > - to my knowledge - only possible via wget iff the GIT repository
> > has gitweb enabled. But that's just a workaround.
> 
> No.
> 
> You can use a shallow clone to fetch only X commits back into
> history on any branch, and you can also manually configure the
> fetch specification in .git/config to only fetch specific branches,
> but you must fetch the entire tree to get any of the files in it.
> 
> If the repository is available by git:// protocol you may be able
> to use git-archive to obtain a tarfile for just the directory you
> want (service has to be enabled on the remote side) but that is
> just a raw UNIX tar; there is no Git repository and no ability to
> commit/fetch/push/diff/apply/log/etc.

Note that what you wanted is, I guess, something called partial
checkout or subtree checkout.  This feature appears now and then in
feature requests; lately Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy (pclouds) offered to do
this in "on subtree checkout" thread:
  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/74915

The problem is twofold, as far as I understand it. First, what to do if there is merge conflicts outside checked out (selected) directory? Second, how to make repository contain only relevant objects: git in many places assumes full connectivity, and that if it has an object it hass all objects depending on it.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git