Re: [RFC PATCH 00/12] Sparse checkout

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:

On 7/24/08, Jakub Narebski [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

 Second, I think you can simply special case .git* files (.gitignore,
 .gitattributes, .gitmodules), and always check them out for all
 intermediate directories (unless configured otherwise, of course).
 So for example if you have the following directory structure:

  A/.gitignore
  A/a
  A/B1/.gitignore
  A/B1/b
  A/B2/.gitignore
  A/B2/c

 and you are checking out only subdirectory 'B1' (and all files in it;
 if subdirectories are checked out recursively it depends on
 configuration), and if for example there is .gitignore in every
 directory, then checked out tree would look like this:

  A/.gitignore
  A/B1/.gitignore
  A/B1/b

 The ability to do this is one of advantages of 'sparse' checkout over
 'subtree' checkout.

Or teach git to use index version of those files. Or collect all those
files, combine them and put the result to .git/info/exclude (and
similar places). Anyway well organized repos won't have this problem.

Checking some files out as read-only (like this case) may be
interesting. Though I do not how much complicated it can be.

I think teaching git to use index version of .git* files (.gitignore,
.gitattributes, .gitmodules) would be much more work than adding
default rule that .git* files in leading directories are by default
checked out, just like leading directories are checked out.  This
would limit modifying git code, I think, and chances for errors.

Having "leading" directories and files read-only would be a good idea,
I think.

I don't understand the sentence "well organized repos won't have this
problem". I think well organized repos _would_ have this problem,
because of maintained and distributed top-level .gitignore and
.gitattributes.

P.S. I hope that 'sparse checkout' feature would be ready for 1.7.0
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland