Re: Change set based shallow clone

[Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>]

Junio C Hamano writes:

> That's a dubious idea.
> 
>  - Why assume a tag points directly at a commit, or if it is
>    not, why assume "foo^{}" (dereferencing repeatedly until we
>    get a non-tag) is special?

Umm, I'm not sure what you're getting at here - if one shouldn't make
those assumptions, why does git ls-remote output both the tag and
tag^{} lines?

>  - Why assume the user wants access to only the object name of
>    what the tag points at?  Perhaps most users would want to
>    have its type, dates (committer and author), and probably the
>    first line of the commit message if it is (and most likely it
>    is) a commit?  -- at least gitweb and gitk would want these.

There are two things here.  Gitk needs to know which IDs have tags
when displaying the graph, and their names.  It doesn't need to know
the other details until someone clicks on the commit or the tag.  Thus
the information that needs to be collected for every tag at startup is
just the name and the sha1 id of the commit it eventually points to
(if it doesn't eventually point to a commit it's basically not
interesting).

Paul.