Subject: Re: Feedback outside of the user survey

From: Christian Jaeger <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 19:30:03 +0200

Christian Jaeger wrote:
> Andreas Ericsson wrote:
>> Christian Jaeger wrote:
>>> Hm, not sure whether you mean to rescue the situation with rewritten 
>>> commits here -- but hell no, I certainly don't mean to have 
>>> different commit objects for different clones/checkouts.
>>>
>>
>> Then you'll be transferring all objects over the wire anyway
>
> Why? Again, care to differentiate between technical feasibility and 
> current implementation.

I think it was this detail:

> ... lazy cloning

which I have been leaving under the carpet in my previous mails; i.e. 
when doing merges, Git may need additional objects which haven't been 
fetched by just fetching the branches's subdirectory parts, so merges 
can't generally be done offline anymore. This is certainly a departure 
from the current idea; and if you don't want to depart from that, then 
yes, you'd need basically the whole database in advance or merges 
wouldn't be possible. So I think I understand why you said "Then you'll 
be transferring all objects over the wire anyway", you did assume that 
there would be no such thing as on-demand / lazy fetching of missing 
objects.

Christian.