[RFC] Not grabbing ALL branches and tags with git clone

[RFC] Not grabbing ALL branches and tags with git clone

[Carl Baldwin]

Greetings,

Lately, I've found that 'git clone' gives me more than what I want.
Especially when there are a lot of branches and tags in the remote
repository.

I have found myself doing something like the following in most cases.

% mkdir work && cd work
% git init-db
% git fetch <url> <refspec>
% git checkout -f -b master <branch>

Usually, I will use a file in .git/remotes but you get the idea.  I was
thinking that it might make sense to make git clone able to do this.
Change the usage of git clone so that it looks like this:

git clone [-l [-s]] [-q] [-u <upload-pack>] [-n] <repo> <dir> [<refspec>] ...

git clone would behave exactly the same way if no refspec were given but
if a refspec (or multiple refspecs) were given on the command line then
git clone would behave more like my series of three commands above.

I haven't looked at what it would take to patch git clone for this
purpose.  Just wanted to see what you thought.

Cheers,
Carl

-- 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 Carl Baldwin                        Systems VLSI Laboratory
 Hewlett Packard Company
 MS 88                               work: 970 898-1523
 3404 E. Harmony Rd.                 work: Carl.N.Baldwin@hp.com
 Fort Collins, CO 80525              home: Carl@ecBaldwin.net
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Re: [RFC] Not grabbing ALL branches and tags with git clone

[Junio C Hamano]

Carl Baldwin <cnb@fc.hp.com> writes:

> Lately, I've found that 'git clone' gives me more than what I want.
> Especially when there are a lot of branches and tags in the remote
> repository.

When I make a clone of git.git, oftentimes the first thing I do
is:

	$ git branch -D todo

But I've always considered that a rare exception (i.e. the todo
branch is not related to the main source).  What kind of
unrelated things do you keep in a single repository such that
you do not want to start out in sync with all of its branches?