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git/Documentation/technical/shallow.txt
Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy 4dcb167fc3 fetch: add --unshallow for turning shallow repo into complete one
The user can do --depth=2147483647 (*) for restoring complete repo
now. But it's hard to remember. Any other numbers larger than the
longest commit chain in the repository would also do, but some
guessing may be involved. Make easy-to-remember --unshallow an alias
for --depth=2147483647.

Make upload-pack recognize this special number as infinite depth. The
effect is essentially the same as before, except that upload-pack is
more efficient because it does not have to traverse to the bottom
anymore.

The chance of a user actually wanting exactly 2147483647 commits
depth, not infinite, on a repository with a history that long, is
probably too small to consider. The client can learn to add or
subtract one commit to avoid the special treatment when that actually
happens.

(*) This is the largest positive number a 32-bit signed integer can
    contain. JGit and older C Git store depth as "int" so both are OK
    with this number. Dulwich does not support shallow clone.

Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2013-01-11 09:09:30 -08:00

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Shallow commits
===============
.Definition
*********************************************************
Shallow commits do have parents, but not in the shallow
repo, and therefore grafts are introduced pretending that
these commits have no parents.
*********************************************************
The basic idea is to write the SHA1s of shallow commits into
$GIT_DIR/shallow, and handle its contents like the contents
of $GIT_DIR/info/grafts (with the difference that shallow
cannot contain parent information).
This information is stored in a new file instead of grafts, or
even the config, since the user should not touch that file
at all (even throughout development of the shallow clone, it
was never manually edited!).
Each line contains exactly one SHA1. When read, a commit_graft
will be constructed, which has nr_parent < 0 to make it easier
to discern from user provided grafts.
Since fsck-objects relies on the library to read the objects,
it honours shallow commits automatically.
There are some unfinished ends of the whole shallow business:
- maybe we have to force non-thin packs when fetching into a
shallow repo (ATM they are forced non-thin).
- A special handling of a shallow upstream is needed. At some
stage, upload-pack has to check if it sends a shallow commit,
and it should send that information early (or fail, if the
client does not support shallow repositories). There is no
support at all for this in this patch series.
- Instead of locking $GIT_DIR/shallow at the start, just
the timestamp of it is noted, and when it comes to writing it,
a check is performed if the mtime is still the same, dying if
it is not.
- It is unclear how "push into/from a shallow repo" should behave.
- If you deepen a history, you'd want to get the tags of the
newly stored (but older!) commits. This does not work right now.
To make a shallow clone, you can call "git-clone --depth 20 repo".
The result contains only commit chains with a length of at most 20.
It also writes an appropriate $GIT_DIR/shallow.
You can deepen a shallow repository with "git-fetch --depth 20
repo branch", which will fetch branch from repo, but stop at depth
20, updating $GIT_DIR/shallow.
The special depth 2147483647 (or 0x7fffffff, the largest positive
number a signed 32-bit integer can contain) means infinite depth.