[RFC] Not grabbing ALL branches and tags with git clone

Greetings,

Lately, I've found that 'git clone' gives me more than what I want. Especially when there are a lot of branches and tags in the remote repository.

I have found myself doing something like the following in most cases.

% mkdir work && cd work % git init-db % git fetch <url> <refspec> % git checkout -f -b master <branch>

Usually, I will use a file in .git/remotes but you get the idea. I was thinking that it might make sense to make git clone able to do this. Change the usage of git clone so that it looks like this:

git clone [-l [-s]] [-q] [-u <upload-pack>] [-n] <repo> <dir> [<refspec>] ...

git clone would behave exactly the same way if no refspec were given but if a refspec (or multiple refspecs) were given on the command line then git clone would behave more like my series of three commands above.

I haven't looked at what it would take to patch git clone for this purpose. Just wanted to see what you thought.

Cheers, Carl