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

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> writes:

> Right. But upon finding the new name for clone, I wondered why
> this has to be submodule specific. The attr pathspecs are also working
> with any other files. So if you don't use submodules, I think it would be
> pretty cool to have a
>
>     git clone --sparse-checkout=Documentation/ ...

It would be cool, but arent' "sparse" and the various existing
status "submodule" has very different things?

 - A submodule can be uninitialized, in which case you do get an empty
   directory but you do not see .git in it.

 - A path can be excluded by the sparse checkout mechanism, in which
   case you do not get _anything_ in the filesystem.

So "git clone --sparse-exclude=Documentation/" that does not waste
diskspace for Documentation/ directory may be an interesting thing
to have, and "git clone --sparse-exclude=submodule-dir/" that does
not even create submodule-dir/ directory may also be, but the latter
is quite different from a submodule that is not initialied in a
superproject that does not use any "sparse" mechanism.

Besides, I think (improved) submodule mechanism would be a good way
forward for scalability, and "sparse" hack is not (primarily because
it still populates the index fully with 5 million entries even when
your attention is narrowed only to a handful of directories with
2000 leaf entries; this misdesign requires other ugly hacks to be
piled on, like untracked cache and split index).

I do not think we want "submodule" to be tied to and dependent on
the latter.