Re: [PATCH 00/18] Partial clone (from clone to lazy fetch in 18 patches)

On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 7:39 AM, Jeff Hostetler [off-list ref] wrote:

As I see it there are the following major parts to partial clone:
1. How to let git-clone (and later git-fetch) specify the desired
   subset of objects that it wants?  (A ref-relative request.)
2. How to let the server and git-pack-objects build that incomplete
   packfile?
3. How to remember in the local config that a partial clone (or
   fetch) was used and that missing object should be expected?
4. How to dynamically fetch individual missing objects individually?
    (Not a ref-relative request.)
5. How to augment the local ODB with partial clone information and
   let git-fsck (and friends) perform limited consistency checking?
6. Methods to bulk fetching missing objects (whether in a pre-verb
   hook or in unpack-tree)
7. Miscellaneous issues (e.g. fixing places that accidentally cause
   a missing object to be fetched that don't really need it).

Thanks for the enumeration.

As was suggested above, I think we should merge our efforts:
using my filtering for 1 and 2 and Jonathan's code for 3, 4, and 5.
I would need to eliminate the "relax" options in favor of his
is_promised() functionality for index-pack and similar.  And omit
his blob-max-bytes changes from pack-objects, the protocol and
related commands.

That should be a good first step.

This sounds good to me. Jeff Hostetler's filtering (all blobs, blobs
by size, blobs by sparse checkout specification) is more comprehensive
than mine, so removing blob-max-bytes from my code is not a problem.

We both have thoughts on bulk fetching (mine in pre-verb hooks and
his in unpack-tree).  We don't need this immediately, but can wait
until the above is working to revisit.

Agreed.