f42fa470b0
It is tempting to do away with commit_graft altogether (in the long haul), now that grafts are deprecated. However, the shallow feature needs a couple of things that the replace refs cannot fulfill. Let's point that out in the documentation. Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
61 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
61 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
Shallow commits
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===============
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.Definition
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*********************************************************
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Shallow commits do have parents, but not in the shallow
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repo, and therefore grafts are introduced pretending that
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these commits have no parents.
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*********************************************************
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$GIT_DIR/shallow lists commit object names and tells Git to
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pretend as if they are root commits (e.g. "git log" traversal
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stops after showing them; "git fsck" does not complain saying
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the commits listed on their "parent" lines do not exist).
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Each line contains exactly one SHA-1. When read, a commit_graft
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will be constructed, which has nr_parent < 0 to make it easier
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to discern from user provided grafts.
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Note that the shallow feature could not be changed easily to
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use replace refs: a commit containing a `mergetag` is not allowed
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to be replaced, not even by a root commit. Such a commit can be
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made shallow, though. Also, having a `shallow` file explicitly
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listing all the commits made shallow makes it a *lot* easier to
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do shallow-specific things such as to deepen the history.
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Since fsck-objects relies on the library to read the objects,
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it honours shallow commits automatically.
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There are some unfinished ends of the whole shallow business:
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- maybe we have to force non-thin packs when fetching into a
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shallow repo (ATM they are forced non-thin).
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- A special handling of a shallow upstream is needed. At some
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stage, upload-pack has to check if it sends a shallow commit,
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and it should send that information early (or fail, if the
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client does not support shallow repositories). There is no
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support at all for this in this patch series.
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- Instead of locking $GIT_DIR/shallow at the start, just
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the timestamp of it is noted, and when it comes to writing it,
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a check is performed if the mtime is still the same, dying if
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it is not.
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- It is unclear how "push into/from a shallow repo" should behave.
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- If you deepen a history, you'd want to get the tags of the
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newly stored (but older!) commits. This does not work right now.
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To make a shallow clone, you can call "git-clone --depth 20 repo".
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The result contains only commit chains with a length of at most 20.
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It also writes an appropriate $GIT_DIR/shallow.
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You can deepen a shallow repository with "git-fetch --depth 20
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repo branch", which will fetch branch from repo, but stop at depth
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20, updating $GIT_DIR/shallow.
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The special depth 2147483647 (or 0x7fffffff, the largest positive
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number a signed 32-bit integer can contain) means infinite depth.
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