"git clone --shallow-exclude ...", fatal: the remote end hung up unexpectedly

  probably doing something idiotic but i'm enumerating variations of
shallow cloning, and tried the following:

$ git clone --shallow-exclude=master https://github.com/django/django.git Cloning into 'django'... fatal: the remote end hung up unexpectedly $

  it is entirely reproducible, and some googling suggests that this
represents an error at the *other* end, which in some weird way does
not support that clone option. that seems strange ... should this
option work? am i using it incorrectly?

  wait, hang on ... i just picked one of django's topic branches at
random, and this did succeed:

$ git clone --shallow-exclude=stable/2.0.x https://github.com/django/django.git Cloning into 'django'... remote: Enumerating objects: 33112, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (33112/33112), done. ... etc etc ... $

but all this gave me was the master branch. i clearly don't understand what this option is supposed to do.

rday