Vendor branches on sourceware.org's binutils-gdb repo

[Mark Kettenis]

> Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 16:27:22 +0200 (CEST)
> From: Michael Matz <matz@suse.de>
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Sun, 6 Apr 2014, Joel Brobecker wrote:
> 
> > > I think it's very useful for users to have all vendor branches in a 
> > > single repository. At least with glibc this has helped me a lot (as a 
> > > user) when identifying and cherry-picking needed fixes to my own 
> > > systems.
> > 
> > FWIW: I have found that the extra branches are just making me download 
> > lots of commits that I have no use for, and I suspect that this is the 
> > case for many of us. That's the default behavior, and most users will be 
> > impacted by those. While it's convenient, it is also very easy to pull a 
> > branch from another repository.
> 
> But it's not necessarily easy for the vendor to _host_ that other 
> repository.

Really?  Are there really companies that are active in the Free
Software community that don't have the infrastructure to host a
relatively small git repo?

> And IMHO, the current 288 MB for binutils-gdb git objects aren't
> enough to discourage vendor branches (and if you're worried about
> the download size it's equally easy to simply not pull those
> branches).

Size is an issue for me.  I try to support GDB on many platforms, some
of which are somewhat old or low power and don't have a lot of disk
storage.  I'm already running into problems on some of my machines.
And every time git messes up my repo because I run out of disk space
(or just because it doesn't seem to properly implement DWIM) I need to
fetch everything all over again.

So how do I tell git to only clone master and not give me everybody
else's shit?  Last time I tried to do that, it simply didn't work.