Re: Quick way to clone exactly one branch

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 04:45:44PM -0400, Avery Pennarun wrote:

> Is there a quick alternative to the following?
> 
>    mkdir myproj
>    cd myproj
>    git init
>    git fetch git://whatever master
>    git checkout -b master FETCH_HEAD
> 
> Basically, the above is a lot like 'git clone' but only clones the
> 'master' branch.  For really big projects with lots of junk in other
> branches, the above can save a lot of bandwidth.

No, AFAIK there isn't a simpler way to do it. But it is something people
have asked about before, so I think it would be a nice addition.

You can't even use "git remote" because it doesn't allow you to tweak
the refspecs you add. To do it "just like clone" I think you would have
to:

  git config remote.origin.url git://whatever
  git config remote.origin.fetch refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master

It would be nice if that could be:

  git remote add -b master origin git://whatever

and then make it available as:

  git clone -b master git://whatever

Multiple "-b <branch>" options would generate refspecs to pull multiple
branches. You could even allow "git clone --refspec=<whatever>", but I
don't know what you would use that much flexibility for (and at that
point, you are probably comfortable enough to write the config
yourself).

-Peff