Re: [nongnu] main 385623dca6 2/2: * elpa-packages (notmuch): New package.

[Philip Kaludercic]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> While I hope Git grows support for "partial clones" (or more likely is
> superseded by something else which does support such things), the
> current situation is that you just can't do that.  Which means
> `elpa-diffs` will be spammed with irrelevant commit to the non-Emacs
> part of Notmuch, for example, and `package-vc` will still have to
> download the 10MB of Notmuch's repository just to get at the relevant
> 0.5MB.

Do you know if this is being worked on?  Does it even fit into Git's
internal model?

(This might be too hacking, but I recently found out that GitHub
supports checking out repositories using Subversion.  I guess they use
some bridge to translate the requests.  I don't know if it is possible
to make use of this and a second SVN->Git bridge to check out partial
repositories as SVN does)

> The closest we can get, AFAIK, is to run an interposer repository which
> fetches from https://git.notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch and filters the
> `emacs` subtree into a new branch, and then add *that* branch to
> `elpa-packages`.  Of course, that creates a whole parallel history, so
> it may end up biting us down the line, but I think given the current
> situation it'd the "least wrong" way to do it (The Right Way being if
> they do that split upstream and then use the new branch as the official
> upstream).

This was discussed back when I wanted to add a few modes developed in
mono-repos (erlang was one example, cmake is another).  I had managed to
make this work using filter-branch IIRC, but we never set up a mirror.
Perhaps we should tackle that again, even if the solution is suboptimal
and host the filtered repositories on savannah.nongnu.org.  I could set
up a similar structure to nongnu.git and have each repository we are
interested in mirrored on their own branches that
nongnu.git:elpa-packages would target.