Re: [PATCH] fetch: add config to avoid fetching every branch in shallow repo

From: Harald Nordgren <haraldnordgren@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 21, 2026, 21:45 UTC
Message-ID: <CAHwyqnWbbCK40qAU1vhCFmN86J-dCY3tv_N_nBYgK2Bxf3o1fg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7f084e4d-f738-4bd4-9b4d-cad995f04be8@gmail.com>

On Mon, Sep 21, 2026 at 3:28 PM Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

>
> Hi Harald
>
> On 19/09/2026 15:47, Harald Nordgren via GitGitGadget wrote:
> > From: Harald Nordgren <haraldnordgren@gmail.com>
> >
> > In a shallow, sparsely checked out clone of a repository with many
> > branches, plain git pull can take minutes or hang outright, even
> > though only one branch is actually being worked on.
>
> I think the sparse checkout is irrelevant? It is unclear to me if this
> is talking about a case where there are many branches in the remote
> repository and only one of them was cloned, then adding a second remote
> created a wildcard fetch refspec

Yeah likely. I cloned my fork of homebrew-core with `--depth=1` and then added real upstream as a remote. Then I made my work on a feature branch.

Then tried to set my branch to track upstream, but it didn't work.

Then 'git pull' and it hung.

> If it is the former then we should think
> how we can improve the behavior of "git remote add" in a sparse
> repository to prevent it adding a wildcard fetch refspec and instead
> setup the new remote to fetch only the branch(es) we're interested in.

I didn't even consider that, that sounds like an interesting idea!

Harald