Re: Adding more namespace support to git

[Richard <richard.maw@gmail.com>]

On 22 August 2016 at 20:16, Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 07:36:31PM +0100, Richard wrote:
>> On 21 Aug 2016 15:07, "Josh Triplett" <josh@joshtriplett.org> wrote:
>> > I'd like to see it work more automatically than that.  Perhaps a
>> > separate environment variable to set the client-side namespace?
>>
>> How about a config option? That could be set globally, per repository, in
>> the environment or on the command line.
>
> That might work, though you wouldn't normally want to set it globally or
> per-repository (since it affects access to a repository and you'd
> typically want to use multiple different values or it wouldn't have much
> point).

Globally is a bit contrived, but could be used to keep the top-level
namespace clean
so you might opt to default to fetching into a namespace called "main"
so that if you need to temporarily fetch into a different namespace it
wouldn't be problematic.
Perhaps it's a kernel tree from a vendor with a messy branch naming scheme
so you don't want to fetch it into your primary namespace and make it
difficult to find your branches,
but you don't know which of their branches you need until you've got them all.
So you fetch into the different namespace rather than a fresh clone
to avoid re-fetching everything (numerous alternative solutions exist)
Then once you've found out which branch you need,
you make a note, switch back to the "main" namespace and re-fetch just
that branch.

A per repository default namespace could also be useful
if an upstream repository has multiple namespaces (code vs
documentation maybe) you could fetch them all
and then switch between them when you need to work on different parts,
and if it's config rather than an environment variable it will persist
between shell sessions easier.