Help with sparse checkouts

[Ari Entlich <atrigent@ccs.neu.edu>]

Hello all!

At my current workplace, I have a git-svn repository which has an extremely large working directory. I did not use the --stdlayout option in this clone, so I have a number of branches in my working directory which duplicate large amounts of trunk. There is a particularly large subdirectory which has now been copied to branches four times (and hence shows up in my working directory 5 times). This directory and its copies are making up the vast majority of the files and storage space in my working directory. Furthermore, I do not need or want to have access to the data in these particular directories. Hence, I would like to use the sparse checkouts feature to exclude them from my working directory.

Let's say that these directories are all called "thedir". What I would like to do with the sparse checkouts feature is to simply ignore directories with this name anywhere in the working tree. Intuitively, it seems like I should be able to put:

!thedir

or possibly

!thedir/

in the sparse-checkout file, but these don't seem to work. I've tried a number of other things, but I always seem to either get the "sparse checkout leaves no entry on working directory" error or no effect at all. In the end, I basically just don't really understand how this file is supposed to work, so I'd rather get some expert help here rather than thrashing about randomly. I realize that sparse checkouts is usually used to select a specific directory rather than what I'm trying to do, so I accept that what I want may simply not be possible with the current implementation. I've asked on IRC, but I wanted to ask here also since it seemed that most of the people I talked to weren't that familiar with the sparse checkouts feature.

Note that, while using --stdlayout would mitigate the massive working directory somewhat, I would still probably want to exclude this directory from my worktree. I will probably do a reclone at some point and use --stdlayout, but I will still want to exclude this particular directory even at that point. I had a lot of people on IRC telling me to just use --stdlayout, which was a good suggestion, but didn't fully fulfill my needs.

Thanks!

Ari