Re: question (possibly) on git subtree/submodules

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Chris Packham wrote:

> The short answer is no. Nothing git has currently will let you clone a
> subset of files. Shallow clones exist if you want all the code and the
> last X changes. The reason for this is git, like other DVCSes, tracks
> _changes_ rather than _files_ this is something that took me a while to
> get my head around when I was learning git.

Not quite as cut-and-dried as it may sound, I think.  Internally git
compresses blobs (and other objects) by comparing them to other ones,
but I do not think that is what you are talking about, and I do not
see what that has to do with partial clones.  In fact, the main reason
I can see that partial clones (in the sense of getting all metadata
but not all blobs) are not implemented is that no one has written code
for it yet.

Here is a thread on related work[1].  Maybe someone else can find a
more pertinent link.

> The best advice I've seen is to actually take your repository and use
> git filter-branch to create several smaller repositories

Right, and this is what “git subtree” excels at.  It provides an
alternative interface and implementation for “git filter-branch
--subdirectory-filter”.

Hope that helps,
Jonathan

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/73117/focus=73935