On Thu, 22 Sep 2016, Alex Pilon wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 07:43:34AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > (side note: currently updating all my git wiki pages and tutorials,
> > so i'll be asking a number of questions about git, including
> > apparently trivial ones that might not be so trivial.)
>
> Sweet.
>
> > pro git book makes the claim:
> >
> > "In a DVCS (such as Git, Mercurial, Bazaar or Darcs),
>
> People still use the last two‽
>
> > clients don’t just check out the latest snapshot of the files: they
> > fully mirror the repository."
> >
> > is that claim true in *every* case? as in, is there no "distributed"
> > VCS that doesn't necessarily mirror the entire repo that was cloned or
> > checked out?
>
> At least Git can do shallow clones, though that's not the normal use
> case.
>
> > i'm not sure how that would work but, theoretically, it might be
> > possible to still have some sort of distributed operation where
> > you don't have the entire repo history on your local machine.
>
> If distributed file sharing and filesystems exist, a PoC DVCS should
> be possible. How radically different of a departure from your Git
> workflow were you imagining? Just lazy but automatic retrieval of
> history from your remotes? Lazy push to your remotes? Seamless
> developer networks? Lazy server push to past clients? Sharding?
> More?
>
> Kiss goodbye to force push and history rewriting.
... snip ...
i wouldn't want to try to change my workflow to accommodate those
changes either, i was just curious as to whether "DVCS" *necessarily*
implies full copy of history on local machine and, thus far, it would
seem to.
rday
p.s. i've also never needed to do a shallow clone, but i tested that
last week on the linux kernel source repo, and cloning to a depth of
just 1 reduced size down to 10%. so maybe there's value for that if
one is *really* strapped for disk space or net bandwidth.
--
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Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
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