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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/technical/shallow.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/technical/shallow.txt | 20 |
1 files changed, 11 insertions, 9 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/technical/shallow.txt b/Documentation/technical/shallow.txt index 5183b15422..01dedfe9ff 100644 --- a/Documentation/technical/shallow.txt +++ b/Documentation/technical/shallow.txt @@ -8,20 +8,22 @@ repo, and therefore grafts are introduced pretending that these commits have no parents. ********************************************************* -The basic idea is to write the SHA-1s of shallow commits into -$GIT_DIR/shallow, and handle its contents like the contents -of $GIT_DIR/info/grafts (with the difference that shallow -cannot contain parent information). - -This information is stored in a new file instead of grafts, or -even the config, since the user should not touch that file -at all (even throughout development of the shallow clone, it -was never manually edited!). +$GIT_DIR/shallow lists commit object names and tells Git to +pretend as if they are root commits (e.g. "git log" traversal +stops after showing them; "git fsck" does not complain saying +the commits listed on their "parent" lines do not exist). Each line contains exactly one SHA-1. When read, a commit_graft will be constructed, which has nr_parent < 0 to make it easier to discern from user provided grafts. +Note that the shallow feature could not be changed easily to +use replace refs: a commit containing a `mergetag` is not allowed +to be replaced, not even by a root commit. Such a commit can be +made shallow, though. Also, having a `shallow` file explicitly +listing all the commits made shallow makes it a *lot* easier to +do shallow-specific things such as to deepen the history. + Since fsck-objects relies on the library to read the objects, it honours shallow commits automatically. |