Re: Change set based shallow clone

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

On Sun, 10 Sep 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

If we did the same pack-file approach that we do for objects, the problem 
ends up being that _updating_ things is really hard. What we could do (and 
might work) is that a "git repack" would create a "packed representation 
of the heads too".

To clarify: I'm _not_ suggesting actually using the "pack-file" 
representation itself for the references.

I'm saying that we could have something like a

	.git/refs-packed

file, which could be (for example) just a plain linear text-file, of the 
form

	19ed368b17abfb9ad5c7467ea74fd8a045d96b43	refs/heads/html
	60a6bf5f53635005f4f68d8b8a33172309193623	refs/heads/maint
	...

ie it would contain just a linear file with the "<hex></tab><refname>"
format.  Then, the way to look up a reference would be:
...
NOTE! It's important that whatever sceme used gets locking right. The 
above suggestion gets it right simply because it doesn't really _change_ 
anything. Any new or modified ref ends up using the old code, and using a 
".lock" file and renaming it automatically does the same thing it ever 
did.

This is all interesting and can be done by somebody interested
in the really core part of the system.

I was just looking at Paul's "new" branch, and realized that
there is something else that somebody _else_ can do in parallel
to make life easier for gitk and gitweb, and it is not on so
bare-metal-core side.  The latest commit in Paul's "new" branch
says:

    We were doing two execs for each tag - one to map the tag ID to a commit
    ID (which git ls-remote was already giving us as refs/tags/foo^{}) and
    one to read the contents of the tag for later display....

I think this is a typical problem any Porcelain layer faces.  To
grab summary information for all refs in a concise form in one
go.

We discussed such a potential command about a month ago with
Jakub, but the suggestion did not go anywhere.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/25013/focus=25055

In addition to what I described there, such a command should at
least allow specifying some special formatting for tag objects,
such as dereferencing it once (i.e. what the object name and
type of the referenced object is) and dereferencing it
repeatedly until a non-tag appears (i.e. "$that_tag^{}" along
with its type).

The show-ref command will alleviate the fork+exec problem; the
core side update you suggested for ref handling will improve the
performance of the implementation of such a command and can be
done in parallel.