Re: Will git have a baseline feature or something alike?

On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 9:10 PM, eric miao [off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 9:21 PM, Jakub Narebski [off-list ref] wrote:
 > "eric miao" [off-list ref] writes:
 >
 >  > I kept a mirror of
 >  >
 >  > http://www.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git
 >  >
 >  > by a crontab task fetching the updated commits at midnight everyday.
 >  >
 >  > Yet I found the repository now grows to be 1.2G without checking out
 >  > anything. The checked out working tree of this is about 1.5G.
 >
 >  Did you (re)packed this repository, running "git gc", or "git repack"?
 >  Currently git either downloads small packs, or loose objects; it needs
 >  to repack to make repository size smaller.
 >
 >  BTW. the largest git repository is 1.6G OpenOffice.org conversion,
 >  with > 2G checkout, and some large binary files under version
 >  control. Mozilla and GCC, other large repos, got under 0.5G IIRC.
 >  So kernel should be quite smaller.
 >
 >
 >  > I tried "git prune" and "git repack" but it still remains so large. The
 >  > trend of the kernel is still going to be enlarged. Thus I'm thinking
 >  > of the possibility of a baseline feature. One can totally forget about
 >  > the history before that baseline, and start the development there
 >  > after.
 >
 >  There is so called "shallow clone" feature, which allows to clone only
 >  part of history. Currently it dupports only --depth, i.e. number of
 >  commits from tips; it could I guess support providing tag as
 >  delimiter. (You are welcome to implement it ;-).
 >

 I haven't ever used the shallow clone, but it looks still a bit different
 from what I thought originally, say, if I download linux-2.6.24.tar.bz2
 from kernel.org, that's about 40MB and should be a fair amount.
 I then unpack and "git init", I expect it to recognize it's a v2.6.24,
 and I can thereafter use "git fetch" to fetch those commits after
 v2.6.24 from git.kernel.org. Is this possible?

I tried shallow clone (depth 1) with a fairly old linux-2.6 repo and
the pack was 68MB. A bit bigger than 40MB but still acceptable IMO.
The tarball+git-init way, I don't think it work. Maybe kernel.org
could release shallow git bundles in addition to tarballs so  users
like you can download a bundle, make a repo from it and keep up with
"git fetch".

-- 
Duy