Re: efficient cloning

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> writes:

> That way the only extra dwimery would be to add "remotes" after
> "heads" under .git/refs and accept directory in .git/remotes/ as ref
> and tack on '/master' at the end of it as the last option to
> search. For a specific branch on an imported remote, one would have to
> say "jc/next". This means we still only handle 'master' specially so
> we don't introduce any new protected or special names.

Two things that holding me back from doing what you suggested
are (1) "master" is just a convention and indeed non-negligible
number of kernel.org trees have "test" and "release" instead
without "master"; (2) I'd really really really want to avoid
teaching get_sha1_basic() C-level about .git/remotes/$origin
file, even though that function is more of a UI level than the
rest of the really core C-level routines.

But if I were forced to choose between the above 2, I would
probably pick defaulting to "master".

The reason I would like to avoid .git/remotes/$origin is because
it is designed to be Porcelainish thing.  The underlying C-level
git-fetch-pack never sees it; instead the information fed to
C-level is prepared by the upper layer using that file.  As far
as I understand, Cogito does not understand it either, except
that it ships with bash completion code that reads from
filenames there.