Re: .gitlink for Summer of Code

[Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>]

On Tue, 27 Mar 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> Think of it this way: if you think people find it a bit annoying that you 
> currently have to get all the history when you do clone (and why people 
> have worked on "shallow clones" in git), imagine just *how* frustrating it 
> is if you have to get all five-hundred subprojects when you only want to 
> work on one small one!

Is it fair to say that subproject support means that there's a use case 
where everybody will need shallow clones? And that it points out natural 
triggers for shallowness?

I don't see that the "shallow clone" mechanism is special for subprojects 
(and I don't think that a solution that depends on subprojects being what 
causes it is a good idea), but clearly it makes sense to support: (1) no 
clone of submodules, (2) shallow clone of submodules, and (3) full clone 
of submodules.

Somebody working on gcc for *BSD would presumably want to get all of gcc 
and a shallow clone of the other 1000 submodules, right? Or they'd just 
clone the submodule and ignore the superproject. At least, they'd need 
shallow clones of a bunch of the submodules, because it's not interesting 
to have the superproject otherwise.

	-Daniel
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