Portfiles with fetch.type git ... can one add arguments to git?

[Lawrence Velázquez]

On Aug 16, 2014, at 8:04 AM, René J.V. Bertin <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm whipping up a portfile for kdevplatform-devel and kdevelop-devel, aiming to follow the git repo. KDevplatform has a rather big repo, which is re-fetched each time I modify the portfile. It'd be useful to do a `git clone --depth=1` to avoid downloading the entire commit history for what might be just a single build ... is that possible?

The blunt answer is no.

The nuanced answer is that portfetch does pass "--depth=1" if ${git.branch} is empty, but you'd only be fetching the remote's heads, and we strongly discourage working from heads. (It precludes reproducible builds.)

If your primary concern is development hassle, one workaround is to manually clone the repository somewhere once, then set ${git.url} to its local path while you're developing. Not only do you avoid fetching over the network, Git will simply hardlink the object database instead of using its usual transport mechanisms.

vq