I just pushed out this very useful thing to "checkout-cache", which is best just described by its commit log:
Add the ability to prefix something to the pathname to "checkout-cache.c" This basically makes it trivial to use checkout-cache as a "export as tree" function. Just read the desired tree into the index, and do a checkout-cache --prefix=export-dir/ -a and checkout-cache will "export" the cache into the specified directory. NOTE! The final "/" is important. The exported name is literally just prefixed with the specified string, so you can also do something like checkout-cache --prefix=.merged- Makefile to check out the currently cached copy of "Makefile" into the file ".merged-Makefile". Basically, I can do a a "git-0.6" release with a simple checkout-cache --prefix=../git-0.6/ -a which basically says: check out all files, but use the prefix "../git-0.6/" before the filename when you do so. Then I just do cd .. tar czvf git-0.6.tar.gz git-0.6 and I'm done. Very cool, very simple, and _extremely_ fast. Doing the tree export (not the tar) for the whole kernel takes two minutes in the cold-cache case (not so wonderful, but acceptable), and 4.6 _seconds_ in the hot-cache case (pretty damn impressive, I say). (The compressng tar then takes about 20 seconds for me, and that's obviously all from the cache, since I just wrote it out). NOTE! The fact that the '/' at the end of the --prefix= thing is meaningful can be very confusing, I freely admit. But it does end up being potentially quite useful, and you're likely to script usage of this anyway into "git export" or something, so... Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html