Re: VC mode and git

[Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> As others have pointed out, using a separate repository each time does
> not guarantee that these problems will not happen.  […]
>
> So I think this kind of workflow doesn't save one from any problems
> you might encounter with a single clone.  It definitely has a
> disadvantage of cloning the repository each time, which involves
> moving 400MB through the wire, and takes many minutes.

That could be helped by using shallow clones, though. You only ever need 
a full clone if you wish to examine old history, and you could keep just 
one full clone for that purpose, while having many shallow clones for 
hacking.

If the clone is *too* shallow, I imagine you could get in trouble with 
merge operations, though. I am not sure about this, but the merge based 
workflow used seems to produce a history with several parallel branches 
much of the time, and that could force a merge operation to look further 
back than you might expect to find a common ancestor to use as a basis 
for merging. This is pure speculation on my part, though. If one ever 
runs into this problem, it is easily remedied by running git fetch 
--depth=n with some suitable n, but it is a potential complication with 
this approach.

– Harald