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>