Re: [PATCHv2 0/6] git clone: Marry --recursive and --reference

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 9, 2016, 15:49 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqk2fqc583.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20160809040811.21408-1-sbeller@google.com>

Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

> v3:
>
> Thanks to Junios critial questions regarding the design, I took a step back
> to look at the bigger picture. 
>
> --super-reference sounds confusing. (what is the super referring to?)
> So drop that approach.
>
> Instead we'll compute where the reference might be in the superproject scope
> and ask the submodule clone operation to consider an optional reference.
> If the referenced alternate is not there, we'll just warn about it and
> carry on.

I like the general direction, but I hope that the warning comes only when the user said "--reference" on the command line (i.e. "you asked me to use reference, but for this submodule I couldn't find a usable one"). If the implementation allows the same mechanism to help later "submodule init && submodule update" borrow from the submodule repositories of the superproject the current superproject borrows from (i.e. no explicit "--reference" on the command line when doing init/update), I would think the case that needs warning is "you didn't explicitly ask me to borrow objects, but I found one we could, so I did it anyway without being asked", and it is not a warning-worthy condition if we didn't find a cloned submodule in the repository our superproject borrows from.

Thanks.