Feature request: support shallow clones

[aviflax]

I ❤️ GitUp and want to use it for all of my repos.

One of my company’s repos, however, has 44,573 commits, and a full clone takes up ~450MB of drive space. So I prefer to use a shallow clone — I clone it with e.g. git clone --depth=2 <repo-url>

The resulting repo works great with CLI Git but GitUp doesn’t support it — when I try to open the repo with GitUp, I get an error dialog with text like this:

object not found - no match for id (74b74c439a7747bb9c738555d88913c41a606a99)

and an OK button — when I click OK, the dialog disappears, and that’s it — no repo window.

I know this has been reported in the past as a bug (#364, #477) but I thought perhaps it might be helpful to have this tracked as a feature request rather than a bug.

Thank you!

[lucasderraugh]

Thanks for the submission. I'm not familiar enough with the capabilities of shallow clones to know whether it's a limitation we can work around or not. I think it's worth keeping as an open bug for some further investigation though.

If anyone wants to dig into what capabilities exist in GitUp today that we'd be unable to support (in theory) that would be helpful.

[sherwinski]

+1 for shallow clone support
When shallow cloning, git will only pull in the repo history of a specified number of commits from the branch tip. In the example that @aviflax mentioned (git clone --depth=2 <repo-url>) this means that only the latest two commits will show on their local repository. It looks like the id shown in the error dialog refers to the commit before the most downstream one cloned, which is missing because it was not included as part of the shallow clone.
If I had to wager a guess, gitup doesn't like this because it's expecting a commit that should exist but doesn't. A simple workaround would be to just treat the most downstream commit as the "first" one even if it expects to have a parent commit present.

[millerf]

+1 for shallow support
I came upon the same issue, and I have been using GitUp for years. I might not be able to use it anymore and I feel sad.

[jasongregori]

+1, I just thought to try a shallow repo since ours is over a decade old and makes gitup slow down often then ran into this.

[stefsava]

+1, many well-known and long-standing open source projects have repos that are too large and it makes no sense to clone them without a depth limitation

[lucasderraugh]

libgit2 still doesn't support shallow clones, so therefore we cannot.

[lucasderraugh]

Actually I may stand corrected? Does the continuous channel build work with them? We updated libgit2 there and it seems like they may understand the depth param now.

[sherwinski]

I made an attempt at implementing this: @lucasderraugh please take a look when you get a chance 🙏

[lucasderraugh]

Thanks, I'm on leave for some time, but will prioritize when I'm back.