FEATURE/QUESTION: git fetch only commit objects, but not tree/file objects

Hello everyone,

Sometimes I'd like to investigate the commit history of a (large) git repository, but I don't actually (yet) care about the actual files in the repository. I know about shallow clones, but it covers kind of the opposite problem: a person may just want the files, but not the history.

1. Is there a way to download only the git commit objects, and not the
corresponding tree (or file) blobs?

2. Is this a use case that anyone else cares about?  I suppose a ton of code
assumes it can follow any references, so implementing this as a feature means a
ton of code would need to be adapted to handle the reference-not-locally-present
case.  Maybe it might be interesting, but would make the git code-base way too
complicated?

I don't really know what keywords to look for, and man git-fetch did not superficially seem to answer this, so I apologize if I wasn't able to find this feature in the documentation.

Best, Antonio

Antonio Russo <aerusso@aerusso.net> writes:

You probably want to look for "--filter" in "git help clone".