Re: [PATCH 00/18] Partial clone (from clone to lazy fetch in 18 patches)

[Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com>]

On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 7:39 AM, Jeff Hostetler <git@jeffhostetler.com> wrote:
>
> As I see it there are the following major parts to partial clone:
> 1. How to let git-clone (and later git-fetch) specify the desired
>    subset of objects that it wants?  (A ref-relative request.)
> 2. How to let the server and git-pack-objects build that incomplete
>    packfile?
> 3. How to remember in the local config that a partial clone (or
>    fetch) was used and that missing object should be expected?
> 4. How to dynamically fetch individual missing objects individually?
>     (Not a ref-relative request.)
> 5. How to augment the local ODB with partial clone information and
>    let git-fsck (and friends) perform limited consistency checking?
> 6. Methods to bulk fetching missing objects (whether in a pre-verb
>    hook or in unpack-tree)
> 7. Miscellaneous issues (e.g. fixing places that accidentally cause
>    a missing object to be fetched that don't really need it).

Thanks for the enumeration.

> As was suggested above, I think we should merge our efforts:
> using my filtering for 1 and 2 and Jonathan's code for 3, 4, and 5.
> I would need to eliminate the "relax" options in favor of his
> is_promised() functionality for index-pack and similar.  And omit
> his blob-max-bytes changes from pack-objects, the protocol and
> related commands.
>
> That should be a good first step.

This sounds good to me. Jeff Hostetler's filtering (all blobs, blobs
by size, blobs by sparse checkout specification) is more comprehensive
than mine, so removing blob-max-bytes from my code is not a problem.

> We both have thoughts on bulk fetching (mine in pre-verb hooks and
> his in unpack-tree).  We don't need this immediately, but can wait
> until the above is working to revisit.

Agreed.