Efficient retrieval of commit log info

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.