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Is it possible to download all commits but not the files themselves? I want to run bisect but download the versions from the build server instead of compiling myself.

Bruno Martinez
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    Do you mean to get the .git file only? – ignacio Dec 11 '19 at 04:56
  • @ignacio Even more — only commits without trees and blobs. – phd Dec 11 '19 at 12:47
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    Food for thought and experiments: you can try to use `git clone --filter=blob:none` but for this you need the very latest client and the very latest server that supports Git Protocol version v2. Further reading: https://stackoverflow.com/a/48852630/7976758, https://stackoverflow.com/a/52916879/7976758, https://stackoverflow.com/a/57896644/7976758 – phd Dec 11 '19 at 12:50
  • Also my advice is to estimate the number of commits you need to run `git bisect` and use `git clone --depth` to avoid cloning the entire repository. Combine that with `--bare` or `--no-checkout`. – phd Dec 11 '19 at 12:52

1 Answers1

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When you run git bisect you can supply --no-checkout as argument if you do not want to checkout a new working tree for each iteration.

Same goes for git clone --no-checkout to avoid a working tree based on HEAD after the clone.

You can run git bisect run my_script <arguments> having my_script do whatever you want after each checkout.

In summary:

git clone <repo> --no-checkout
git bisect --no-checkout run my_script arguments

EDIT:

As per the suggestion of @phd, since recent versions (v2.2x) of git, "partial clones" are now supported meaning you can supply a clone "filter".

https://git-scm.com/docs/partial-clone

In your case we'll use --filter=blob:none and --filter=tree:0 and only retain commit-objects, but it requires the server to have a version of git installed that understands the filter or you'll get a warning:

warning: filtering not recognized by server, ignoring

The clone command you'll want to use:

git clone <repo> --filter=blob:none --filter=tree:0 --no-checkout
zrrbite
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