Re: sparse fetch, was Re: [PATCH 08/12] git-clone: support --path to do sparse clone

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi,

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Sverre Rabbelier wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 8:53 PM, Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> wrote:
> >  I don't follow how these two issues arise, if the server will do the 
> > pruning for you. It will just skip entering some tree objects when 
> > doing object traversal; why opening the git protocol or faking 
> > commits? This would be a simple extra capability in the protocol.
> 
> Wouldn't that be as simple as passing a pathspec to git-rev-list? Not a 
> lot of overhead there I reckon.

So the server would _not_ have to deflate the objects to inspect them?  I 
thought you knew more about Git's object database.

> > One question is what to do with delta chains including unwanted 
> > objects, but I think that given the objects' associativity for delta 
> > chains, this shouldn't be huge practical issues and it could be 
> > affordable in principle to include even unwanted objects.
> 
> Just keep them?

You'd still have to inspect the objects, which is way more work than the 
current code has to do.  Remember: in the optimal case, upload-pack does 
not more than just serve the existing deltas/base objects.

Ciao,
Dscho