Treeless clones in GitHub Actions

[sliekens]

Hi,

The Git Checkout action for GitHub Actions recently got support for git clone --filter, which means you can now do a partial clone.

While typically not as fast as a shallow clone, a partial clone is still considerably faster than a full clone. More importantly, it allows fetching the entire commit history, which is needed for MinVer to work correctly.

To enable it:

steps:
  - name: Checkout
    uses: actions/checkout@v4
    with:
      fetch-depth: 0 # (no history limit)
      filter: tree:0

Update the action to v4 and add filter: tree:0 to do a treeless clone. Note that you still need to override fetch-depth: 0 to disable shallow cloning.

You can also do a blobless clone instead of a treeless clone with filter: blone:none if your workflow needs to get the history of a file (git log -- <path>). Otherwise git will start downloading the root trees for almost every commit in the history, which is painfully slow.

More info actions/checkout#1396

Enjoy

[sliekens]

PS I did some testing and it currently does not seem to be supported by MinVer unrelated issue

There is an issue with Source Link which reports an error with partial clones. I think a similar problem with sparse checkouts was fixed in dotnet/sourcelink#772 but the fix was not released. I created a new issue for this problem in dotnet/sourcelink#1111.

/github/home/.nuget/packages/microsoft.build.tasks.git/1.1.1/build/Microsoft.Build.Tasks.Git.targets(25,5): error : Error reading git repository information: Unsupported repository version 1. Only versions up to 0 are supported. [/__w/gw2sdk/gw2sdk/GW2SDK/GW2SDK.csproj::TargetFramework=netstandard2.0]
/github/home/.nuget/packages/microsoft.build.tasks.git/1.1.1/build/Microsoft.Build.Tasks.Git.targets(25,5): warning : Unable to locate repository with working directory that contains directory '/__w/gw2sdk/gw2sdk/GW2SDK'. [/__w/gw2sdk/gw2sdk/GW2SDK/GW2SDK.csproj::TargetFramework=netstandard2.0]

So maybe a bit more work needs to be done before we can fully enjoy this... 😅

Just to be clear, this does work perfectly if you don't need Source Link. 👍

UPDATE

The Source Link issue is resolved in .NET 8, which ships with a newer version of Source Link. You should uninstall the v1.1.1 packages of Source Link, as they will produce the error above, even if you are on .NET 8.