Shallow clones

[Vampire]

I think for the use-cases of this plugin doing shallow clones would be appropriate, so that you don't need to clone the full history for a repository just to use the latest state for building.
Optimally it would be an option, so that users can decide whether they want shallow clones or not.

[melix]

I thought about this but the problem is that it makes the logic of updating much more complicated. What if you change the branch configuration and had shallow=true? What if you had shallow=false, change it to true with a different branch? etc. Not saying that this isn't doable, but it is much more complex to implement.

[Vampire]

Keep this open for when you are bored and need something to do. :-D
It's not super important, but it would save disk space and clone time. :-)

[vlsi]

jgit does not support shallow clones yet (see https://git.eclipse.org/r/c/jgit/jgit/+/193329 ), so the implementation would probably need to switch to the native git client.

I think it is reasonable to assume people would have git installed.

What if you change the branch configuration and had shallow=true

I would suggest adding an explicit parameter like 'fetchDepth: Int(ordepth: Int`, see https://github.com/actions/checkout#checkout-head)

[melix]

I am not particularly fond of the idea of re-inventing the wheel by implementing a wrapper on top of Git...

[vlsi]

I am not particularly fond of the idea of re-inventing the wheel by implementing a wrapper on top of Git...

Same here, however, I'm inclined jgit is too limited, so I am inclined that using git is better than jgit.

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For reference, here's IDEA's reasoning regarding native git vs jgit: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEABKL-5595/git4idea-switch-to-java-implementation-of-Git#focus=Comments-27-270524.0-0

I believe the following issues directly impact includegit even though includegit does not seem to demand much from git:

• shallow clone
• credential integrations

I've run into this issue when I tried using includegit for https://github.com/jlink/jqwik which unexpectedly stored all the documentation history committed under the default branch: jqwik-team/jqwik#370

[neilmarietta]

JGit added shallow clone support in version 6.3.

https://wiki.eclipse.org/JGit/New_and_Noteworthy/6.3

[vlsi]

6.x requires Java 11 :-(

[neilmarietta]

Is it an issue ?

[vlsi]

For instance, we keep https://github.com/pgjdbc/pgjdbc buildable with Java 8, so adding dependency on jgit which requires Java 11 would be problematic.

Even thought pgjdbc does not use includegit-gradle-plugin, we use jgit for creating/pushing git tags for the release purposes, so I'm inclined to use regular git client instead.