-Def.: Shallow commits do have parents, but not in the shallow
+Shallow commits
+===============
+
+.Definition
+*********************************************************
+Shallow commits do have parents, but not in the shallow
repo, and therefore grafts are introduced pretending that
these commits have no parents.
+*********************************************************
-The basic idea is to write the SHA1s of shallow commits into
+The basic idea is to write the SHA-1s of shallow commits into
$GIT_DIR/shallow, and handle its contents like the contents
of $GIT_DIR/info/grafts (with the difference that shallow
cannot contain parent information).
at all (even throughout development of the shallow clone, it
was never manually edited!).
-Each line contains exactly one SHA1. When read, a commit_graft
+Each line contains exactly one SHA-1. When read, a commit_graft
will be constructed, which has nr_parent < 0 to make it easier
to discern from user provided grafts.
You can deepen a shallow repository with "git-fetch --depth 20
repo branch", which will fetch branch from repo, but stop at depth
20, updating $GIT_DIR/shallow.
+
+The special depth 2147483647 (or 0x7fffffff, the largest positive
+number a signed 32-bit integer can contain) means infinite depth.