Re: Exec upload-pack on remote with what parameters to get direntries.

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

There is no operation to list the tree contents, for example, nor really
even a good way to fetch a single object. The protocol is geared around
efficiently transferring slices of history, so it is looking at sets of
reachable objects (what the client is asking for, and what it claims to
have).

You might be able to cobble something together with shallow and partial
fetches. E.g., something like:

  git clone --depth 1 --filter=blob:none --single-branch -b $branch

I was hoping that our support for fetching a single object (not
necessarily a commit) at the protocol level was good enough, so that
Stef's fuse/nfs daemon can fetch the tree object it is interested
in.

There also is an effort, slowly moving to add verbs like object-info
to the protocol to help the vfs usecase, but primitives at too low a
level would be killed by latency, so it is somewhat unknown how
effective it would be.