Consider the possibility of git cloning cli doing a shallow clone instead

[ghost]

I've reported issue #40193 about the speed of cloning.

I understand there's improvements with cloning, it's now possible to use the git cli.

Is it possible for the git cli to do a shallow clone with git shallow clone with git clone --depth 1 --quiet $url $source_path instead?
Makes cloning much faster, and decreases the no of objects downloaded.

[StefanKarpinski]

I believe that GitHub does not like shallow clones in the sense that they support them but it overloads their servers if too many people do it. If that's still the case, it would be rude of us to default to using a shallow clone. This also wouldn't be in a release prior to 1.7 and for that release, we're going to download tarballs and use them without unpacking them, which addresses the performance issues on Windows, allowing us to stop defaulting to using git clones at all there (at which point we could use a shallow clone since not that many people would be doing it).

[KristofferC]

Ref CocoaPods/CocoaPods#4989 (comment) and https://blog.cocoapods.org/Master-Spec-Repo-Rate-Limiting-Post-Mortem/.