Re: [PATCH] git clone depth of 0 not possible.

Stefan Beller [off-list ref] writes:

On 01/08/2013 03:28 PM, Duy Nguyen wrote:

quoted

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 2:36 PM, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Speaking of --depth, I think in Git 2.0 we should fix the semantics
of "deepening" done with "git fetch".

Speaking of 2.0, we should support depth per ref. Well we don't have
to wait until 2.0 because we could just add shallow2 extension to the
pack protocol. We should also apply depth to new refs when fetching
them the first time.

Would this mean I could do something along?
$ git clone --since v1.8.0 git://github.com/gitster/git.git

So tags would be allowed as anchors?

As the end-user facing UI, I think it would be much easier to use
for users who want to get only the recent part of history that is
relevant to their development if you allowed them to ask "starting
from this one, I do not care anything older than that" with such an
interface.  The current "count how many more generations you want"
interface is crazy in that it forces you to count what you have not
even seen; I suspect the only reason it was done in such a hacky
manner was implementation expediency.

At the syntax level, however, I do not think we can use --since
there, because the keyword has a very different meaning already.

I personally do not think "depth per ref" deserves "it would be nice
to support in 2.0", let alone "2.0 *should* support", label.  Some
may find it an interesting mental exercise to think about corner
cases it will introduce and have to deal with (e.g. you ask 100 from
master and 2 from maint, but maint is behind master by less than
100---what should happen?), but I do not particularly see any
practical use cases, and I highly doubt that there is much value in
bringing in extra complexity such a "feature" requires to do it
right.