How to “git show” on a remote repo?

Question

I\'m trying to hook my git repository with Microsoft\'s Source Server feature such that people debugging into my binary will automatically pull source files down from github

Answer 1

Unfortunately git does not support fetching individual remote files. There are three workarounds:

• Use git fetch to get the remote history, then snatch the file from the local object store.
• Use git archive to get a complete tree (e.g. git archive --remote=url master:somesubdir) in tar format on stdin.
• Setup gitweb or something like that on the server and get the file through that.

Answer 2

If you are installing binaries on a system, and are expecting people to be "debugging into your binary", it seems you could install a few extra files, no?

One of those could be a $HOME/.gitconfig (or whatever it is called on windows) that has aliases in it, something like:

[remote "msrepo"]
   url = http://microsoft/git/url.git
[alias]
   msreposhow "git fetch --no-pager msrepo; git show $1"

Then you could do a "git msreposhow SHAKEY" in one step, which will call the alias and execute both commands in one step.