shallow clones are bad? [LWN.net]

shallow clones are bad?

Posted Sep 1, 2026 7:19 UTC (Tue) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
In reply to: shallow clones are bad? by mricon
Parent article: Ryabitsev: Creepy crawlies

For high traffic servers like kernel.org, would it perhaps make sense to have the shallow clone pack already prepared for the head of commonly shallow clones branches?

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shallow clones are bad?

Posted Sep 1, 2026 14:05 UTC (Tue) by mricon (subscriber, #59252) [Link] (2 responses)

There's no reasonable way to do this, because everyone's shallow clone is different. Some will want --depth 0, some --depth 10, others just commits and no blobs. The only predictable pack we can create is when someone making a full clone.

shallow clones are bad?

Posted Sep 2, 2026 7:38 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

I would assume the vast majority of CI wants exactly the content of the current commit a branch points to to build that. Plus maybe some metadata on the commit itself (like its commit hash and tags) to include in the built --version output.

shallow clones are bad?

Posted Sep 2, 2026 14:30 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

CI should not point to branches. The forge should reserve a ref for a CI pipeline to use based on the branch (e.g., GitLab uses refs/pipelines/PIPELINE_ID). Just because the branch was on commit X when the pipeline was created doesn't mean that a job started an hour from now won't get commit Y when asking for the same branch name.

Tags are also not populated (by default) when forking, so you may also need a step to fetch tags from the target project in addition to the code from the source project.