For plugins that are deployed to the WordPress Plugin repository, sake currently downloads the entire content of the tags directory in that plugin's repo. As a result, on each deploy, sake downloads a copy of every version of the plugin that has ever been released.
This is an example of all the files that would have to be downloaded to deploy a new version of WooCommerce PayPal Powered by Braintree extension:
For plugins that are deployed to the WordPress Plugin repository, sake currently downloads the entire content of the tags directory in that plugin's repo. As a result, on each deploy, sake downloads a copy of every version of the plugin that has ever been released.
This is an example of all the files that would have to be downloaded to deploy a new version of WooCommerce PayPal Powered by Braintree extension:
https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/woocommerce-gateway-paypal-powered-by-braintree/tags
Downloading those extra files increases the execution time of the deploy task and sometimes causes the task to fail due to network errors.
I believe the solution involves adding something like https://github.com/wvega/github-to-wordpress-deploy-script/commit/c76393fb9b4b73d4b7ee9eb14e825752127bce85 to the checkout task, but haven't tested those modifications in sake.