Subject: Re: RFC: reverse history tree, for faster & background clones

From: "Andres G. Aragoneses" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2015 13:39:19 +0200

On 12/06/15 13:33, Dennis Kaarsemaker wrote:
> On vr, 2015-06-12 at 13:26 +0200, Andres G. Aragoneses wrote:
>
>> AFAIU git stores the contents of a repo as a sequence of patches in the
>> .git metadata folder.
>
> It does not, it stores full snapshots of files.

In bare repos too?

>> 1. `git clone --depth 1` would be way faster, and without the need of
>> on-demand compressing of packfiles in the server side, correct me if I'm
>> wrong?
>
> You're wrong due to the misunderstanding of how git works :)

Thanks for pointing this out, do you mind giving me a link of some docs 
where I can correct my knowledge about this?

>> 2. `git clone` would be able to allow a "fast operation, complete in the
>> background" mode that would allow you to download the first snapshot of
>> the repo very quickly, so that the user would be able to start working
>> on his working directory very quickly, while a "background job" keeps
>> retreiving the history data in the background.
>
> This could actually be a good thing, and can be emulated now with git
> clone --depth=1 and subsequent fetches in the background to deepen the
> history. I can see some value in clone doing this by itself, first doing
> a depth=1 fetch, then launching itself into the background, giving you a
> worktree to play with earlier.

You're right, didn't think about the feature that converts a --depth=1 
repo to a normal one. Then a patch that would create a --progressive 
flag (for instance, didn't think of a better name yet) for the `clone` 
command would actually be trivial to create, I assume, because it would 
just use `depth=1` and then retrieve the rest of the history in the 
background, right?

Thanks