clone: add --sparse mode

When someone wants to clone a large repository, but plans to work
using a sparse-checkout file, they either need to do a full
checkout first and then reduce the patterns they included, or
clone with --no-checkout, set up their patterns, and then run
a checkout manually. This requires knowing a lot about the repo
shape and how sparse-checkout works.

Add a new '--sparse' option to 'git clone' that initializes the
sparse-checkout file to include the following patterns:

	/*
	!/*/

These patterns include every file in the root directory, but
no directories. This allows a repo to include files like a
README or a bootstrapping script to grow enlistments from that
point.

During the 'git sparse-checkout init' call, we must first look
to see if HEAD is valid, since 'git clone' does not have a valid
HEAD at the point where it initializes the sparse-checkout. The
following checkout within the clone command will create the HEAD
ref and update the working directory correctly.

Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/builtin/sparse-checkout.c b/builtin/sparse-checkout.c
index fcf97e9df8..e3418fbe2a 100644
--- a/builtin/sparse-checkout.c
+++ b/builtin/sparse-checkout.c
@@ -102,6 +102,7 @@ static int sparse_checkout_init(int argc, const char **argv)
 	char *sparse_filename;
 	FILE *fp;
 	int res;
+	struct object_id oid;
 
 	if (set_config(MODE_ALL_PATTERNS))
 		return 1;
@@ -126,6 +127,11 @@ static int sparse_checkout_init(int argc, const char **argv)
 	fprintf(fp, "/*\n!/*/\n");
 	fclose(fp);
 
+	if (get_oid("HEAD", &oid)) {
+		/* assume we are in a fresh repo */
+		return 0;
+	}
+
 reset_dir:
 	return update_working_directory();
 }