Re: [PATCH 00/17] Clean up how fetch_pack() handles the heads list

["Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org>]

From: "Jeff King" <peff@peff.net>
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2012 8:56 PM
> On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 08:13:29PM +0100, Philip Oakley wrote:
>
>> >>I'm still suspicious about the logic related to args.fetch_all and
>> >>args.depth, but I don't think I've made anything worse.
>> >
>> >I think the point of that is that when doing "git fetch-pack --all
>> >--depth=1", the meaning of "--all" is changed from "all refs" to
>> >"everything but tags".
>> >
>>
>> There is a comment in \git\Documentation\technical\shallow.txt that
>> "- If you deepen a history, you'd want to get the tags of the
>>  newly stored (but older!) commits. This does not work right now."
>> which may be the source of this restriction. That is, how is the 
>> depth
>> of the tag fetching to be restricted to the requested depth count?
>> [assuming I've undestood the problem correctly]
>
> I don't think this is about deepening, but rather about making sure we
> remain shallow for the initial fetch. Remember that this is on the
> "fetch-pack --all" code path, which used to be used by "git clone" 
> when
> it was a shell script (these days, clone is a C builtin and will
> actually feed the list of refs to fetch-pack).

OK

>
> This code blames back to:
>
> commit 4bcb310c2539b66d535e87508d1b7a90fe29c083
> Author: Alexandre Julliard <julliard@winehq.org>
> Date:   Fri Nov 24 16:00:13 2006 +0100
>
>    fetch-pack: Do not fetch tags for shallow clones.
>
>    A better fix may be to only fetch tags that point to commits that 
> we
>    are downloading, but git-clone doesn't have support for following
>    tags. This will happen automatically on the next git-fetch though.
>
> So it is about making sure that "git clone --depth=1" does not
> accidentally pull a single commit from v1.0, v1.1, v1.2, and so forth,
> losing the purpose of using --depth in the first place. These days it 
> is
> largely irrelevant, since this code path is not followed by clone, and
> clone will automatically restrict its list of fetched refs to a single
> branch if --depth is used.
>
> The bug that shallow.txt talks about (and which is mentioned in that
> commit message) is that we will not properly auto-follow tags during
> such a clone (i.e., when we fetch a tag because it is pointing to a
> commit that we already have or are already pulling). I'm not sure if
> that is still the case or not. But assuming your workflow is something
> like:
>
>  [make an initial, cheap clone]
>  git clone --depth=1 $repo
>
>  [the next day, you do a regular fetch, which will just get new stuff
>   on top of what you already have]
>  git fetch
>
> Then that second fetch will auto-follow the tags, anyway. And that is
> what the commit message is pointing: it's a bug, but one you can work
> around.

I hadn't appreciated that the fetch would limit itself to the original 
shallow
depth. I'd gained  the impression that one need to use the --depth to
control what was being fetched.

>
>> It may be (?) that it is a good time to think about a 'datedepth'
>> capability to bypass the current counted-depth shallow fetch that can
>> cause so much trouble. With a date limited depth the relevant tags
>> could also be fetched.
>
> I don't have anything against such an idea, but I think it is 
> orthogonal
> to the issue being discussed here.
OK. I'll stick it on my slow-burner pile ;-)

>
> -Peff