Re: Bug: fetch with deepen shortens history

I think in most cases, people doing shallow clones for testing mainline
branch of whatever project they're hacking. If at some later date they
wish to deepen their clones, they can do that up to specified date:

Yup, that makes sense to me. And it would make sense if it was up to a specified date, but I specifically want to reference a branch (which could move forward) so we can generate commits since then. 
You could imagine it being useful as "docs since last released version" where you don't need a tag for it, you can reference the release branch.

It's nice to be ably to rely on the fact that git refs can change, and so my script can continue to work without needing an update every time.
I guess I could pull the ref and then use the date, but that (a) relies on nothing else happening around then, and (b) seems to be exactly what --shallow-exclude wants to do.

Thanks for the script that you provided.

You bet. As a fellow engineer, I know how helpful perfectly reproducible steps can be. :)

-Benji