Re: [PATCH] [submodule] Add depth to submodule update

[Jens Lehmann <Jens.Lehmann@web.de>]

Am 26.06.2013 23:03, schrieb Junio C Hamano:
> Fredrik Gustafsson <iveqy@iveqy.com> writes:
> 
>> On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 12:11:32AM +0200, Heiko Voigt wrote:
>>> On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 12:49:25AM +0200, Fredrik Gustafsson wrote:
>>>> Used only when a clone is initialized. This is useful when the submodule(s)
>>>> are huge and you're not really interested in anything but the latest commit.
>>>>
>>>> Signed-off-by: Fredrik Gustafsson <iveqy@iveqy.com>
>>>
>>> I this is a valid use case. But this option only makes sense when a
>>> submodule is newly cloned so I am not sure whether submodule update is
>>> the correct place. Let me think about this a little more. Since we do
>>> not have any extra command that initiates the clone this is probably the
>>> only place we can put this option. But at the moment it does not feel
>>> completely right.
>>>
>>> Apart from that the code looks good. If the user does a checkout of a
>>> revision that was not fetched submodule update will error out the same
>>> way as if someone forgot to push his submodule changes. So that should
>>> not be a problem.
>>
>> I agree and would love to say that I've a more beautiful solution, but
>> I haven't.
>>
>> The only other solution I can think about is to add a git
>> submodule clone that will do only clones of non-cloned submodules.
> 
> The "update" subcommand already has "--init" to do "init && update",
> and it would not complain if a given submodule is what you already
> have shown interest in, so in that sense, I do not think what the
> posted patch does is too bad---if it is already cloned, it just
> ignores the depth altogether and makes sure the repository is there.
> A separate "submodule clone" would only make it more cumbersome to
> use, I suspect.

Yup, I see no need for a new command either.

Me too thinks adding "--depth" to "update" makes sense (and I don't
think that this pretty generic name will become a problem later in
case someone wants to add a maximum recursion depth, as grep already
uses "--max-depth" for the same purpose).

But "--depth" should also be added to the "submodule add" command.
As an example we already have the "--reference" option, which is
passed to clone on add and update. Additionally that one supports
the form with and without '=', so I'd prefer the new update option
to basically re-use the same code the reference option uses. And
at least two tests, of course ;-)