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Thu, 19 Mar 2026 05:54:43 -0400 (EDT) Received: by mail (OpenSMTPD) with ESMTPSA id 0ef70372 (TLSv1.3:TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256:NO); Thu, 19 Mar 2026 09:54:42 +0000 (UTC) Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:54:35 +0100 From: Patrick Steinhardt To: Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget Cc: git@vger.kernel.org, gitster@pobox.com, Derrick Stolee Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/5] backfill: accept revision arguments Message-ID: References: Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: On Tue, Mar 17, 2026 at 12:29:16AM +0000, Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget wrote: > The git backfill command assists in downloading missing blobs for blobless > partial clones. However, its current version lacks some valuable > functionality. It currently: > > 1. Only walks commits reachable from HEAD. > 2. It walks all reachable commits to the full history. > 3. It can focus on the current sparse-checkout definition, but otherwise it > doesn't focus on a given pathspec. > > All of these are being updated by this patch series, which allows rev-list > options to impact the path-walk. These include: > > 1. Specifying a given refspec, including --all. > 2. Modifying the commit walk, including --first-parent, commit ranges, or > recency using --since. > 3. Modifying the set of paths to download using pathspecs. > > One particularly valuable situation here is that now a user can run git > backfill -- to download all versions of a specific file or a specific > directory, accelerating history queries within that path without downloading > more than necessary. This can accelerate git blame or git log -L for these > paths, where normally those commands download missing blobs one-by-one > during its diff algorithms. Nice. I think especially blaming is a bit of a sore spot -- downloading blobs one by one simply doesn't cut it there. I wonder whether we can easily use the backfill mechanism to fetch blobs automatically in git-blame(1) so that the user doesn't need to know about git-backfill(1) at all? Patrick