Comment by snthpy
9 hours ago
I've been wanting to ask this:
Why isn't
git clone --depth 1 ...
the default?
I would guess that for at least 90% of the repos I clone, I just want to install something. Even for the rest, I might hack on the code but seldom look into the history. If I do then I could do a `git fetch` at that point and save the bandwidth and disk space the rest of the time.
A question: why is git involved at all in this? You don't want a repository.
This! The default was to have a link to download a tarball of the source. And if the user wanted to contribute (or check the devel version), you would add a link to the vcs.
Grabbing git repos instead of just tarballs is useful.
A) You can update them, because you can git pull to fetch changes.
B) If you want to apply patches on top, its better to have version control so you can keep track of what you changed, especially useful if you want to rebase.
I think gitignore solves a problem that is hard to solve with the traditional tarball approach.
Downloading a tarball and running ./configure or make, editing a config file here or there, etc then running `make install` is the most common flow. Now days I find myself frequently editing the Dockerfile to make it to my liking. With a git repo, the owners of the repo have excluded all the local files, build caches, etc and you can keep pulling to get updates stashing and reapplying your local changes. With tarballs, you have to figure it out all over again. Lose your build cache (language dependent maybe), lose a change you made here or there, etc.
try `git clone --filter=blob:none` instead
https://github.blog/open-source/git/get-up-to-speed-with-par...
https://gitperf.com/chapter-11.html
Thanks. That's great! I especially like that it then lazy loads the blobs as you need them.
I was going to ask if there's a way to set that as the default but I guess I'll just set up an alias like I have for most of the subcommands I use daily.
What if that's only you? Git isn't made only for those who "just want to install something"
Its not the default because that'd be counter-productive to developers who use git with larger repositories, which is how git started life in the first place - your clone depth would be entirely useless for Linux kernel developers, for example, if it were default ..