Grafts workflow for a "shallow" repository...?

Here is my attempt at a "let's publish a shallow repository for branch of moodle". Let me show you what I did...

 # before we start
 git --version
 git version 1.5.5.1

 cat /etc/redhat-release
 Fedora release 9 (Sulphur)

 # clone the 'full' repo ~200MB fully packed
 git clone git://git.catalyst.net.nz/moodle-r2.git

 # 1.7 was a significant release, anything earlier than that
 # is just not interesting -- even for pickaxe/annotate purposes
 # so add a graft point right at the branching point.
 cd moodle-r2
 echo `git merge-base origin/cvshead origin/MOODLE_17_STABLE` >>
.git/info/grafts

 # push the branches I care about to a newly created repo on a different server
 # this is approx 50MB... (as opposed to 200MB)
 git push git+ssh://dev.laptop.org/home/martin/public_git/moodle.git \
    origin/MOODLE_19_STABLE:refs/heads/MOODLE_19_STABLE
 git push git+ssh://dev.laptop.org/home/martin/public_git/moodle.git \
    origin/cvshead:refs/heads/cvshead
 # fixed up the server-side repo to have HEAD pointing to a new branch...

 # clone to see it works...
 git clone  git://dev.laptop.org/git/users/martin/moodle.git

 # and now gitk bails out on me. Not entirely unexpected...
 gitk --all

Is this kind of workflow (or a variation of it) supported? For this to work, we should communicate the grafts in some push operations and read them in clone ops - and perhaps in fetch too.

cheers,

martin