Subject: Re: Change set based shallow clone

From: "Anand Kumria" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 23:20:24 +0000 (UTC)

On Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:09:21 -0400, Jon Smirl wrote:

> On 9/7/06, Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> "Jon Smirl" <[email-masked]> writes:
>>
>> > Does an average user do these things? The shallow clone is there to
>> > address the casual user who gags at a five hour download to get an
>> > initial check out Mozilla when they want to make a five line change or
>> > just browse the source for a few minutes.
>> >...
>> > Maybe the answer is to build a shallow clone tool for casual use, and
>> > then if you try to run anything too complex on it git just tells you
>> > that you have to download the entire tree.
>>
>> For that kind of thing, "git-tar-tree --remote" would suffice I
>> would imagine.  The five line change can be tracked locally by
>> creating an initial commit from the tar-tree extract; such a
>> casual user will not be pushing or asking to pull but sending in
>> patches to upstream, no?
> 
> From my observation the casual user does something like this:
> 
> get a shallow clone

This could basically be something which look at the remote HEAD and pulls
down a copy of that commit/tree (and associated objects), right?

> look at it for a while
> pull once a day to keep it up to date

Same again.

> decide to make some changes
> start a local branch
> commit changes on local branch
> 
> push these changes to someone else for review
> maybe pull changes on the branch back from the other person

[...]

At what point, if any, do you envisage a casual user pulling down a full
copy of the repository?

Cheers,
Anand