Workaround of git Shallow Clone with Submodules

You can clone a git repo only with the most recent revision by using git's "shallow clone" as the following
command.

$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/MyRepo.git

If you have submodules, you would use the option --recursive as follows

$ git clone --depth 1 --recursive https://github.com/MyRepo.git

And you would expect that the submodules are also shallowly cloned, but they are actually full clones.

You can work around this problem by using consecutive commands in one line like the next

$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/MyRepo.git ; cd MyRepo ; git submodule update --init --depth 1

If you use Windows, use &(ampersand) instead of ; (semicolon).

C:\> git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/MyRepo.git & cd MyRepo & git submodule update --init --depth 1

This is such a primitive solution. However, this was really a good tip for using git for build automation.

One of my build jobs kept failing with the following error message.

error: RPC failed; result=56, HTTP code = 200
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
fatal: early EOF
fatal: index-pack failed

It is said that this problem is caused by too big a git repo, maybe with over 20MB. I had big submodules but they were big due to its history. So I thought of the shallow clone, but it didn't work because git doesn't propagate the depth setting to the submodules when I use --recursive option. I couldn't wait for a new git version to fix this. Now I divided and conquered it.