How to git fetch efficiently from a shallow clone

Question

We use git to distribute an operating system and keep it upto date. We can\'t distribute the full repository since it\'s too large (>2GB), so we have been using shallow clon

Answer 1

If you can select a specific branch, it can be even faster. Here's an example using Spark master branch and latest tag:

Initial clone

git clone git@github.com:apache/spark.git --branch master --single-branch --depth 1

Update to specific tag

git fetch --depth 1 origin tags/v1.6.0

It becomes very fast to switch tags/branch this way.