Subject: Re: Git User's Survey 2008 partial summary, part 5 - other SCM

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:12:04 +0200

On Mon, 15 Sep 2008, David Lang <[email-masked]> napisał:
> On Sun, 14 Sep 2008, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:
>> On 9/12/08, Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>>  15) Do you miss features in git that you know from other SCMs?
>>>     If yes, what features are these (and from which SCM)?
>>>     (Open ended text - Essay)
>>>
>>>  Total respondents       1046 (some/many of them wrote 'no')
>>>  skipped this question   1249
>>>
>>>  This is just a very quick summary, based on a first few pages of
>>>  responses, Full analysis is I think best left for after closing the
>>>  survey, because I think this would be a lot of work...
>>>
>>>  So here is preliminary list, or rather beginning of one:
>>>   * sparse/partial checkout and clone (e.g. Perforce)
>>
>> Have not read the survey result, but do you recall what is the most
>> used term for sparse/partial checkout? What SCMs do sparse/partial
>> checkout? I think it could be usable as it is now in my
>> will-be-sent-again series, but I don't really know how people want it
>> to from that.
> 
> the most common use-case is people who want to follow a project but
> (at least think that they) don't need the history. so they want to
> save time/bandwideth/disk space by not downloading things they don't
> need. 

Errr... the idea is to implement partial (sparse, narrow) _checkout_,
which is doable, not partial/lazy _clone_, which is very, very 
difficult.

Partial checkout *might* help reduce disk space because usually 
repository database (which is compressed and deltaified) is smaller 
than checkout; and if it isn't you can always use _shallow_ clone (only 
part of history) and/or remote alternates (with reference repository
not on your quota, or on different filesystem).  And it might help
checkout/commit/diff/status times (performance) on slow filesystems, 
with extremely large number of files in full checkout.  But contrary to
centralized SCM, where server is usually net away from working area,
partial checkout doesn't affect network usage _at all_.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland