Efficient retrieval of commit log info

["Eirik Bjørsnøs" <eirbjo@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I'm developing a piece of software that grabs logs from various types
of SCMs and presents (hopefully) useful information about the history.

My current approach with Git is do a "git clone --n" and then parse
the output of "git log". To check for updates I do a "git pull"
followed by a new "git log".

This approach works fine, but cloning the whole repository just to get
the change log seems like a somewhat inefficient use of bandwidth and
storage.

What I would like to do is to fetch just the change log information
from the remote repository.

(Using the "CVS done right" tool I can do this with: "svn log --xml -v
-r<last, HEAD> http://svn.example.com/")

I haven't found a way to do this using the Git command line tools.

Is it at all possible using the git network protocols to fetch just
the commit log info, without transferring the contents?

I'd be happy to hear from anyone who has some insight into this.

Thanks,

Eirik.