Re: [RFC] Clone repositories recursive with depth 1

[Lars Schneider <larsxschneider@gmail.com>]

On 11 Nov 2015, at 21:09, Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 11:19 AM, Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 6:09 AM, Lars Schneider
>> <larsxschneider@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> I have a clean build machine and I want to clone my source code to this machine while transferring only the minimal necessary amount of data. Therefore I use this command:
>>> 
>>> git clone --recursive --depth 1 --single-branch <url>
>> 
>> That *should* work, actually.
>> However looking at the code it does not.
>> 
>> citing from builtin/clone.c:
>> 
>>    static struct option builtin_clone_options[] = {
>>        ...
>>        OPT_BOOL(0, "recursive", &option_recursive,
>>           N_("initialize submodules in the clone")),
>>        OPT_BOOL(0, "recurse-submodules", &option_recursive,
>>          N_("initialize submodules in the clone")),
>>        ...
>>    };
>>    ...
>>    static const char *argv_submodule[] = {
>>        "submodule", "update", "--init", "--recursive", NULL
>>    };
>> 
>>    if (!err && option_recursive)
>>        err = run_command_v_opt(argv_submodule, RUN_GIT_CMD);
>> 
>> So the --depth argument is not passed on, although "git submodule update"
>> definitely supports --depth.
>> 
>> In an upcoming series (next version of origin/sb/submodule-parallel-update),
>> this will slightly change, such it will be even easier to add the
>> depth argument in
>> there as we construct the argument list in code instead of hard coding
>> argv_submodule.
>> 
>> This may require some discussion whether you expect --depth to be recursed.
>> (What if you only want a top level shallow thing?, What if you want to have only
>> submodules shallow? What is the user expectation here?)
>> 
>>> 
>>> Apparently this does not clone the submodules with "--depth 1" (using Git 2.4.9). As a workaround I tried:
>>> 
>>> git clone --depth 1 --single-branch <url>
>>> cd <repo-name>
>>> git submodule update --init --recursive --depth 1
>>> 
> 
> The workaround works with the origin/master version for me.
> 
> Notice the other email thread, which suggests to include --remote into the
> call to  git submodule update depending on a branch config option being
> present in the .gitmodules file.

Can you check "[PATCH v2] add test to demonstrate that shallow recursive clones fail"? This demonstrates the failure that I see. I also tried the "--remote" flag but this does not work either (see test case).
Can you confirm this behavior?

Cheers,
Lars