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by madawan 3888 days ago
> git can be considered a pretty basic tool

so what about CVS, svn, Mercurial and fossil? Git is hip right now, but including it in an initrd seems excessive. Furthermore git downloads the entire repo, all the history/commits, this isn't always what you want or can handle or want to pay for.
2 comments
lucb1e 3888 days ago
> Furthermore git downloads the entire repo, all the history/commits, this isn't always what you want or can handle or want to pay for.

That's the default behavior, but with `git clone --depth 1` you can apparently download only the latest version of all files: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10449157

Googling around, most pages confirm it. Found this one also informative: http://stackoverflow.com/q/6941889/1201863

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klibertp 3888 days ago
> so what about CVS, svn, Mercurial and fossil

Why, these are pretty basic too. Especially if what you want is just to get the code. Having a bit of experience with any VCS will let you skim the relevant manpage and use another VCS in minutes tops.

> including it in an initrd seems excessive.

True...

> Furthermore git downloads the entire repo

Not necessarily? I think you can download just the source files, without any git metadata, turning git into SVN essentially. I'm not 100% sure though, but I'd be really surprised was it not the case.

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I started my VCS adventure with RCS, then (quickly) moved to CVS, then (even more quickly) to SVN. As soon as DVCS started to appear I switched to bazaar (bzr), then git. These are the VCS I used for my own projects; I probably used a couple more VCSes in a situation where I needed latest code for some project which used something like Mercurial, or Darcs, etc.

In general, I think it's fair to say that Version Control, as a whole, is a basic tool.

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krisdol 3888 days ago
>Not necessarily? I think you can download just the source files, without any git metadata, turning git into SVN essentially. I'm not 100% sure though, but I'd be really surprised was it not the case.

Partially possible. You're always fetching diffs, not files, with git. You can get close to what you said with `git clone --depth 1`, which tells git to only get history for the latest revision, but you still get some git metadata about available branches. Depending on the version of git you're using, you may also have to pass --single-branch in order to only fetch one branch's revision.

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