Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v3 8/8] --sparse for porcelains

From: Johannes Sixt <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:31:32 +0200

Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy schrieb:
> This series is useless until now because no one would use read-tree to
> checkout. At least with this, you can really use/test the series.
> Porcelain design was originally "if you have .git/info/sparse,
> porcelains will use it, if you don't like that, remove
> .git/info/sparse" while plumblings have an option to
> enable/disable this feature.
> 
> And I still like that behavior. How about we enable sparse checkout
> by default for porcelains and make a config option to disable it?

I would enable sparse checkout by default even for plumbing. Whether the
checkout area is sparse should always be governed by .git/info/sparse.
This way, existing scripts and aliases should automatically work in sparse
worktrees.

BTW, the name .git/info/sparse is perhaps a bit too technical in the sense
that only git developers know that this feature runs under the name
"sparse checkout". Perhaps it should be named

   .git/info/indexonly
   .git/info/nocheckout

or so.

-- Hannes