Re: shallow clone not very shallow due to tags

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 19:49, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy [off-list ref] wrote:

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 12:16 AM, Shawn Pearce > Yes, I think a user
who is making a shallow clone should only get the

quoted

HEAD branch to the depth specified, nothing else. If they want
additional branches, they should either pass them on the command line
to a new flag for clone, or modify their fetch configuration
after-the-fact and fetch those separately.

I'd like maintain all refs of the repo, even though we though we only
have objects for one branch. If I do a shallow clone and want to
change branch, I could just list available branch locally instead of
going to gitweb.somewhere for the branch name.

Do we have someway to represent a ref placeholder?

Not currently, no. I haven't checked refs.c, but you may be able to
create an empty (0 byte) ref file for each remote reference we didn't
obtain. These should be ignored since they aren't a valid reference..
Though they might cause warnings to be sent to stderr on every
command, since they exist in the refs directory but aren't a valid
reference.

Of course a placeholder ref cannot be used as a starting point to
checkout something, can it? It has no commit object available. So if
you did decide to checkout a placeholder, you would need to first
fetch that placeholder. So why not use git ls-remote to list the
remotely available branches?

-- 
Shawn.