Re: [PATCH] fetch: add config to avoid fetching every branch in shallow repo

On Mon, Sep 21, 2026 at 3:28 PM Phillip Wood [off-list ref] wrote:

Hi Harald

On 19/09/2026 15:47, Harald Nordgren via GitGitGadget wrote:

quoted

From: Harald Nordgren <redacted>

In a shallow, sparsely checked out clone of a repository with many
branches, plain git pull can take minutes or hang outright, even
though only one branch is actually being worked on.

I think the sparse checkout is irrelevant? It is unclear to me if this
is talking about a case where there are many branches in the remote
repository and only one of them was cloned, then adding a second remote
created a wildcard fetch refspec

Yeah likely. I cloned my fork of homebrew-core with `--depth=1` and
then added real upstream as a remote. Then I made my work on a feature
branch.

Then tried to set my branch to track upstream, but it didn't work.

Then 'git pull' and it hung.

If it is the former then we should think
how we can improve the behavior of "git remote add" in a sparse
repository to prevent it adding a wildcard fetch refspec and instead
setup the new remote to fetch only the branch(es) we're interested in.

I didn't even consider that, that sounds like an interesting idea!


Harald