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

On 1. mars. 2008, at 16.41, Jakub Narebski wrote:

On Sat, 1 Mar 2008, eric miao wrote:

quoted

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?

No, this doesn't work and couldn't work. The tarfile contains only
_contents_ of the working directory, and perhaps commit-id, but it
doesn't contain even shred of history. Git has no information of
where this content is in linux kernel git history.

Okay, as a git n00b I'm probably on completely the wrong track, but if  
you made a git repository out of a kernel tarball (cd linux-2.6.24 &&  
git init && git add .) and then did a shallow fetch from kernel.org  
into that repository, wouldn't the blobs you added get reused  
(assuming the tarball you downloaded was fairly recent), thus reducing  
the amount of data fetch has to transfer?

I'm sure you'd end up transferring more data than just a straight  
shallow clone, but it would be cool if that worked, and might even be  
useful.  I'm downloading 2.6.25-rc3 now to try it out :)

Eyvind Bernhardsen