Re: [PATCH 1/2] clone: add disassociate alias to dissociate option

[Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>]

On 02/24/2015 09:06 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:
>> By the way, once we have stopped thinking about this feature as
>> "--reference" and then "--dissociate", it becomes obvious that a nice
>> generalization would be to allow *any* repository (including remote
>> ones) to serve as the object donor.
> 
> As I do not think of a workable approach to implement such a
> mechanism, I'd refrain from being irresponsible and say "Yeah,
> that's a neat idea", which would make me sound like clueless "me
> too, why doesn't Git do that?" crowd.

I think this would be done by effectively creating a clone of the nearby
repository then a fetch of the distant one, with some reference
shuffling between the steps. If the nearby repository contains far more
objects than the user really wants, then the initial clone will be
wasteful. But since the use case will probably be that the nearby
repository is (1) a mirror of the distant repo, and (depending on how
old it is) contains approximately a subset of the objects in the distant
repository, and (2) much faster to work with than the distant repo, I
think even this crude approach would often be a win.

Michael

-- 
Michael Haggerty
mhagger@alum.mit.edu