Subject: Re: VCS comparison table

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2006 10:27:05 +0200

Sean wrote:

> On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:45:31 +0200
> Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
>> Git cannot do that remotely (with exception of git-tar-tree/git-archive 
>> which has --remote option), yet. But you can get contents of a file 
>> (with "git cat-file -p [<revision>:|:<stage>:]<filename>"), list 
>> directory (with "git ls-tree <tree-ish>") and compare files or 
>> directories (git diff family of commands) without need for working 
>> directory.
> 
> Interesting, I didn't know about the --remote option.  So in fact as long
> as the remote has enabled upload-tar then anyone can do a "light
> checkout". 

Not exactly. "Light checkout" (aka "lazy one-branch clone") in bzr
contains also info about the repository it came from, and has some
metadata that you can commit to it locally. git tar-tree --remote
just gets snapshot. 

> However, it appears that kernel.org for instance doesn't enable this
> feature. 

One can get snapshot from gitweb... if gitweb is new enough and
has this feature enabled (it is enabled by default). Again not
the case of kernel.org