Re: [PATCH] fetch-pack: always allow fetching of literal SHA1s

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> Just a side question, what are the people who use this feature using
> it for? The only thing I can think of myself is some out of band ref
> advertisement because you've got squillions of refs as a hack around
> git's limitations in that area.

That's one use case.

Another is when you really care about the exact sha1 (for example
because you are an automated build system and this is the specific
sha1 you have already decided you want to build).

> Are there other use-cases for this? All the commits[1] that touched
> this feature just explain what, not why.

Similar to the build system case I described above is when a human has
a sha1 (from a mailing list, or source browser, or whatever) and wants
to fetch just that revision, with --depth=1.  You could use "git
archive --remote", but (1) github doesn't support that and (2) that
doesn't give you all the usual git-ish goodness.

Thanks and hope that helps,
Jonathan