git - How to clone/fetch a repo getting only the history

Question

Is it possible to download a repository's commits, branches, and tags, excluding blobs and trees? I would like to be able to view the history and whatnot without downloading the files (this is for the Chromium repo, which is multiple gigs). Obviously I will not be able to see which files were affected by a commit, but that's fine.

Answer 1

No, or at least, not using any ordinary access. Some sites offer web access, through which you can obtain the contents of every commit object without also obtaining tree and blob objects, but the normal process of receiving objects or thin packs is either truncated at the commit level (via --depth) or is complete.

You can of course see all visible tags with git ls-remote as well as through any sensible web interface (it would be weird to provide something like GitHub's fancy API if you didn't provide the tags that way :-) ).

Note that traversing all commits via a web API may be tremendously slow, either due to having to stop and wait (if you program it synchronously rather than as a streaming process) or due to rate limiting software on the host (GitHub and Bitbucket both seem to do rate limiting).