Re: git: using branches

[Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Milo Casagrande <milo casagrande name> wrote:
> Simos Xenitellis ha scritto:
>>
>> We have mentioned these some time ago. Search for 'shallow' clones.
>> It's the '--depth' parameter in 'git clone'.
>>
>> My personal view is that a shallow clone (that is, a clone with limited
>> history)
>> provides small gains. More comments and benchmarking on this would be
>> welcome.
>
> git clone help says also that you cannot push after cloning with a --depth
> option, whereas Git for GNOME translators says it's (almost?) OK: has it
> been tested? I'm not keen on being a guinea-pig for this... :)

I tested this on a demo repository some time ago (you can create free
test git repositories at
github.com), and when I tested it, it worked to my surprise.

I just had a better look into it. The man page says

«you cannot clone or fetch from it, nor push from nor into it»

while the release notes of git mention
(http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git-core/docs/RelNotes-1.5.0.txt)

«Pushing from nor into a shallow clone are not expected to work.»

which is slightly different. In the first case you get the impression
that if you try it,
you will get an error message. However, it looks the proper way to
view it is that
if you push from a shallow clone, it might appear to work.

I am updating http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/GitHowTo
to reflect the above (that is, refrain from shallow clones).

> I'm not really interested in ten years of repository history for pushing a
> couple of files, plus add to that if I also have to locally clone the
> repository...

In practice the space difference is not significant. We should be able to have
real statistics on this soon, so that we can have a proper guideline on
shallow clones.

>> I think that it is better to get full clones of the GNOME release
>> repositories and
>> simply keep them locally, and update (with "git pull --rebase") before
>> committing.
>
> What is the status of damned-lies commit-upload of translations? This, from
> my POV, would be the best solution.
>
AFAIK, the standing issue is the creation of a generic account that
damned-lies will
use when committing on behalf of the translators.

There Accounts team is understaffed and several requests take long to
be fulfilled.
There was a call for volunteers recently and actually it would be great to have
a GNOME translator on this team to push forward the translator requests.

Simos