Re: [RFH] GSoC 2015 application

From: "Stefan Beller" <redacted>

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 2:05 PM, Philip Oakley [off-list ref] 
wrote:

quoted

A possible idea is to add a date based variant of shallow clone :

 'git clone --date <when> ...'

in the same vein as the existing depth (shallow) clone.

As food for thought:
Maybe broaden this further up to the git-ish way of describing refs, 
so

   git clone --since 2.weeks.ago <url>
   git clone --since v2.10 <url>
   git clone --since c0ffee^^ <url>

would all equally work?

The use of --since instead of --date would be an equally valid way of 
spelling the option (coders choice;-)

At the clone stage, the local Git can't determine (for the 2nd & 3d 
option) where such a revison is located, so would have to send the 
revision string to the server for processing, which could complicate the 
protocol. Hence my choice of a simple unix time value at the protocol 
level.

An alternate/addition is to use a nominated sha1 (from ls-remote) as a 
stand in for a date, allowing your option 2 (--since <tag>) to be 
implemented as an alias or script.

It all depends on how complicated we want it to become, but starting 
simple (though extensible) is important.

I am not sure if that is feasible though, but it would come in handy. 
(E.g.
you are an end user and want to bisect down a bug which you notice in 
the
new version X but not in old version Y, so you start on getting the 
sources,
compiling, bisecting)
--

Philip