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

From: Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:00:11 +0200

[email-masked] wrote:
> 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.
> 

I disagree, and this would be a thin or shallow checkout to me (although
I realize the nomenclature is unfortunately similar here). What I've
heard is normally documentation writers that don't want to be able to
even accidentally modify any code, so they just want Documentation/
subdirectory. Shallow clones are already supported (albeit with a lot
of limitations).

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   [email-masked]
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