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

Matthijs Kooijman [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Doing it "correctly" (in the shorter term) would involve:

Given below suggestion, I take it you don't like what Jonathan proposed
(changing the meaning of the deepen parameter in the protocol so that
the server effectively decides how to interpret --depth)?

Correct.

We can implement these two in current git already, since they only
add to the protocol, not break it in an incompatible manner, right?

Correct.

quoted

 - teaching the requestor that got --depth=N from the end user to
   pay attention to the new capability in such a way that:

   - when talking to an old sender (i.e. without the off-by-one
     fix), send N-1 for N greater than 1.  Punt on N==1;

   - when talking to a fixed sender, ask to enable the capability,
     and send N as is (including N==1).

And these should wait for git2, since they change the meaning of the
--depth parameter? Or is this change ok for current git as well?

My suggestion was based on the understanding that everybody agreed
that the current behaviour of --depth=1 to have one extra commit
behind the shallow "snapshot" aka "poor-man's tarball", is a *bug*
to be fixed, so I didn't mean it as a "backward incompatible change"
at all.

What do you mean by "punt" exactly?

As old senders can only send a history with 2 or more commits deep,
it would be sensible for the receiver to warn the user that we are
buggily asking for one more than the user asked for to the sender,
and fetch history with two commits.  It would be a regression to
error it out.

quoted

In the longer term, I think we should introduce a better deepening
mechanism.  Cf.

Even when there will be a better deepening mechanism, the above is still
useful (passing --depth=1 serves to get just a single commit without
history, which is a distinct usecase from deepening the history of an
existing shallow repository).

Correct.  That is why I said "in the longer term, we should
introduce".  Did I say "introduce and replace with it"?