Re: [RFC PATCH 00/12] Sparse checkout

["Avery Pennarun" <apenwarr@gmail.com>]

On 7/24/08, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> wrote:
> OK. I am lost here. I do not know how putting sparse prefix and index
>  together could fix "it" (I think you meant the index guarding).

I think what Dscho is saying is simply that it's natural to put
information about the currently-checked-out tree in the index, and
unnatural to put it in the config.

If I switch branches, or checkout different versions, or git add, or
git rm, it all affects the index, never the config.  The index stores
the attributes of which files are checked out, and can detect whether
those files are different from before.  Choosing which subtrees to
check out sounds a lot more like one of those operations than it does
like a configuration change.

Also, I don't know if git supports this right now, but I can imagine
situations where you'd want to have more than one index (and
associated working trees) sharing the exact same .git folder.  It
would be fine to share the config between these parallel checkouts,
but you certainly couldn't share the index.  And you probably wouldn't
want to check out exactly the same set of subtrees in every working
tree.

The information required to do a checkout is in the index.  And
"sparse checkout" is all about checking out :)

Have fun,

Avery