It seems that if you try to clone & checkout a git repository which makes use of git-lfs, while the current machine doesn’t have git-lfs installed, it simply ‘works’ without any errors or warnings, but ‘does the wrong thing’ (by checking out ‘pointer’ files instead of what they point to, if they’re being managed by git-lfs)

Is there an option you can pass to git clone and/or git checkout which will cause them to fail in this situation, to short-circuit any debugging later on due to the ‘large files’ being mangled?