Re: .gitlink for Summer of Code

Hi,

On Sun, 25 Mar 2007, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Matthieu Moy [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Eric Lesh [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

.gitlink is for a lightweight checkout of a branch into a separate
directory on the local filesystem.

I think it's a pitty to restrict yourself to _local_ filesystem. There
are tons of cases where you have a fast, non-NFS, access to a machine
and would like to host your repository there.

That said, I suppose removing this restriction moves the solution from
the category "quick and efficient hack" to something much harder.

Yes.  But there's another project on the ideas list that addresses
that (``Lazy Clone'').  It is quite a bit more difficult than the
.gitlink idea as the implementation requires a network protocol
client implemented somewhere near the read_sha1_file interface.

Not only that. You'd have to change the way read_sha1_file() is called to 
allow fetching more than one object at a time. Otherwise this will be so 
slow as to be unusable.

That's basically the reason why I changed my mind, and preferred shallow 
clones over lazy clones.

Ciao,
Dscho