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Typically with sparse checkouts, we expect files outside the sparsity
patterns to be marked as SKIP_WORKTREE and be missing from the working
tree. Sometimes this expectation would be violated however; including
in cases such as:
* users grabbing files from elsewhere and writing them to the worktree
(perhaps by editing a cached copy in an editor, copying/renaming, or
even untarring)
* various git commands having incomplete or no support for the
SKIP_WORKTREE bit[1,2]
* users attempting to "abort" a sparse-checkout operation with a
not-so-early Ctrl+C (updating $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout and the
working tree is not atomic)[3].
When the SKIP_WORKTREE bit in the index did not reflect the presence of
the file in the working tree, it traditionally caused confusion and was
difficult to detect and recover from. So, in a sparse checkout, since
af6a51875a (repo_read_index: clear SKIP_WORKTREE bit from files present
in worktree, 2022-01-14), Git automatically clears the SKIP_WORKTREE
bit at index read time for entries corresponding to files that are
present in the working tree.
There is another workflow, however, where it is expected that paths
outside the sparsity patterns appear to exist in the working tree and
that they do not lose the SKIP_WORKTREE bit, at least until they get
modified. A Git-aware virtual file system[4] takes advantage of its
position as a file system driver to expose all files in the working
tree, fetch them on demand using partial clone on access, and tell Git
to pay attention to them on demand by updating the sparse checkout
pattern on writes. This means that commands like "git status" only have
to examine files that have potentially been modified, whereas commands
like "ls" are able to show the entire codebase without requiring manual
updates to the sparse checkout pattern.
Thus since af6a51875a, Git with such Git-aware virtual file systems
unsets the SKIP_WORKTREE bit for all files and commands like "git
status" have to fetch and examine them all.
Introduce a configuration setting sparse.expectFilesOutsideOfPatterns to
allow limiting the tracked set of files to a small set once again. A
Git-aware virtual file system or other application that wants to
maintain files outside of the sparse checkout can set this in a
repository to instruct Git not to check for the presence of
SKIP_WORKTREE files. The setting defaults to false, so most users of
sparse checkout will still get the benefit of an automatically updating
index to recover from the variety of difficult issues detailed in
af6a51875a for paths with SKIP_WORKTREE set despite the path being
present.
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqqbmb1a7ga.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com/
[2] The three long paragraphs in the middle of
https://lore.kernel.org/git/CABPp-BH9tju7WVm=QZDOvaMDdZbpNXrVWQdN-jmfN8wC6YVhmw@mail.gmail.com/
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/git/CABPp-BFnFpzwGC11TLoLs8YK5yiisA5D5-fFjXnJsbESVDwZsA@mail.gmail.com/
[4] such as the vfsd described in
https://lore.kernel.org/git/20220207190320.2960362-1-jonathantanmy@google.com/
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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Elijah Newren