Re: [PATCHv8 0/5] pathspec magic extension to search for attributes

[Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 4:25 AM, Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> wrote:
>> My take is to pretend sparse checkout does not exist at all and then
>> go from there ;-)

Hehe.. shameless plug, narrow checkout [1] should be its great
successor where everything is done right (famous last words). Maybe I
can convince Stefan to finish that off then I'll finally bring narrow
clone!

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/289112

> Using these pathspec attrs are a good example for why we would
> want to make it more generic. Imagine a future, where more attributes
> can be codified into pathspecs and this is one of the possibilities:
>
>     git clone --sparse=":(exclude,size>5MB,binary)
>
> which would not checkout files that are large binary files. We could
> also extend the protocol (v2 with the capabilities in client speaks first)
> to transmit such a requirement to the server.

I think you need narrow clone there ;-) It's the first step to have a
clone with missing directories. I think then we can extend it further
to exclude (large) files.

> Why is sparseness considered bad?

It does not scale well when the worktree gets bigger. It can be slow
(but this is just a technical problem I haven't spent time on fixing).
And it does not enable narrow clone (not with lots of hacks, I think I
did just that in some early iterations).

> If I wanted to just do the submodule only thing, this would be a smaller
> series, I would guess.

No no no. Do more. Start with narrow checkout. I'll help ;-)
-- 
Duy