I am trying to clone a repository with a lot of blobs in its history, and would like to only download the files at a specific commit without any added overhead or redundancy.

When trying git clone --depth 1, the .git directory becomes quite large. This appears to be because of a large packfile, whose file size corresponds to the size reported by git when it is Receiving objects:. Inspecting the packfile with git verify-pack suggests it contains a large amount of blob information.

However, trying git clone --filter=blob:none still results in a similarly large packfile listing blobs.

My expectation would be that --depth 1 shouldn’t be downloading any history, and filter=blob:none shouldn’t be downloading any blob history.

So why is my .git directory being populated with packfile overhead for a shallow clone?

I am wondering if this is perhaps the initial compressed download of the single commit I checked out – but even so, how can I prevent this redundant file from persisting?

For specific reference, the repository I am cloning is ARM-software/CMSIS_5.

This started out as a question about shallow submodules and only downloading files at a specific commit without overhead, but the packfile overhead appears to pertain to cloning in general so I figured I’d start here.