Re: [RFC] Submodules in GIT

On Fri, 1 Dec 2006, Josef Weidendorfer wrote:

quoted

Well, I would actually argue that you may often want to have a supermodule 
and then at least have the _option_ to decide to not fetch all the 
submodules.

If you want to allow this, you have to be able to cut off fetching the
objects of the supermodule at borders to given submodules, the ones you
do not want to track. With "border" I mean the submodule commit in some
tree of the supermodule.

This looks a little bit like a shallow clone

No. 

I would say that it looks more like a "partial checkout" than a shallow 
clone.

A shallow clone limits the data in "time" - we have _some_ data, but we 
don't have all of the history of that data.

In contrast, a submodule that we don't fetch is an all-or-nothing 
situation: we simply don't have the data at all, and it's really a matter 
of simply not recursing into that submodule at all - much more like not 
checking out a particular part of the tree.

So if a shallow clone is a "limit in time", a lack of a module (or a lack 
of a checkout for a subtree in general - you could certainly imagine doing 
the same thing even _within_ a git repository, and indeed, we did discuss 
exactly that at one point in time) is more of a "limit in space".