Re: 'git clone' doesn't use alternates automatically?

[James Pickens <jepicken@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 12:12 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> but presumably in your example the second clone is _not_ on the NFS
> mount, and therefore can't hardlink.

That's correct.

> So you can try "git clone -s" to specify that you definitely want
> alternates.

Well, the clone gets the alternates either way.  It just doesn't
use them to avoid copying the data unless I give -s.  More
importantly, if 'git clone' worked the way I thought, then when I
clone a remote repository for which I have a local mirror, I
could avoid typing '--reference <path to local mirror>' by adding
<path to local mirror>/objects to the alternates file in the
remote repository.

> I don't recall clone ever being that clever, but I could be wrong (it is
> not an area of the code that I am too familiar with).
>
> Can you try a test with a few different versions to see if it ever
> behaved as you expected (and if it does, bisect to find the breakage)?

Damn.  I was hoping the response would be "it's a regression, and
here's a patch to fix it".  I went ahead and tested a few old
versions and they all behave the same way.

So, is there any reason 'git clone' shouldn't automatically use
the alternates that it copied into the new repository?  I might
look into writing a patch if nobody objects.

James