Re: [boost] [git-help] Clone / fetch specific submodule SHA?

On 24 December 2013 21:28, Rene Rivera wrote:

On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 3:12 PM, Beman Dawes wrote:

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On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 3:16 PM, Rene Rivera wrote:

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Does anyone know of a way to do a submodule update and clone that only fetches a specific SHA? In particular the SHA referenced in the superproject?

Isn't that what git submodule update does if you give it a path to the submodule? Assuming the super-project is on branch master, of course. So for Boost.Timer, do:

cd modular-boost # if needed git checkout master # if needed git submodule update libs/timer

Or did I misunderstand your question?

Yes, and no.. submodule update "checks out" the SHA of the commit in the reference of the superproject. It doesn't fetch or clone anything. What I'm asking is if there's a way to, give that I have the superproject (shallow clone, or partial history) to first fetch/clone the SHA of referenced in the superproject *only* and then update to that fetched SHA *only*.

With recent versions of git: git submodule update --depth 1 It's still slow though, and pretty pointless if you have a local mirror. For older versions I think you're going to need a bit of shell scripting. 'git submodule foreach' sets a variable with the hash, you can then do something like the commands at http://stackoverflow.com/a/3489576/2434 to clone it. But 'git submodule' is pretty slow anyway, it's a shell script which has to check lots of configuration options. Tt can be faster to implement things yourself that doesn't bother with configuration. For example you can read the submodules directly from the .gitmodules file, and get their details using git ls-tree: git config -f .gitmodules -l \ | grep '^submodule\.\w*\.path' \ | cut -d = -f2 \ | xargs git ls-tree HEAD If you just want to make a copy of a repo, and don't care about git, it can be quicker using git archive: git archive master | tar -x -C location Could put those two together to make a pretty fast shell script. Or are you doing this in python? I can try to write something if you want.