Consider cases for `--depth=1` when cloning

[kakra]

I feel like this would cause more harm than benefit. People are encouraged to install via a distribution package. Changing the clone depth would prevent people from properly using branches when asked for in the issues. So I'd argue that people who got that far down are more likely to do development or issue reporting stuff. A size delta of 20 MB is just too small to outperform the possible drawbacks. Yes, it's like 85% less storage but in absolute numbers it's just 20 MB - that's a nothingness in today's systems.

If anything like this should go into the documentation, it should be for the stable branch. Unfortunately, this project doesn't have a linear stable branch, we branch off the current development branch when a development feature is ready and backport patches much like the kernel does. This would mean to change the docs on each stable cycle to the new stable branch name.

I'll leave this open as a reminder to amend the docs to encourage people to use their distribution package or a stable release.

Originally posted by @kakra in https://github.com/atar-axis/xpadneo/issues/412#issuecomment-1474807492

[kakra]

@Apacelus I've opened a new issue to follow up on your idea at a later time because at some time in the future it might bring benefits.

[kakra]

Thinking about this, I came to this conclusion:

• If people require a small one-time download size, they should use the release tarball. We could document this but it makes handling updates much more difficult.
• Incremental git updates are much smaller in favor of repeated downloads of release tarballs.
• Storage is cheap, it's not like we do ship hundreds of megabytes of code.
• If people require very small download sizes, they should be smart enough to add --depth=1 to git on their own, also knowing the consequences. We do not want to support the negative consequences this has for possible contributors to the code.

Thus, I'm closing this.