Feature request: Option to shallow clone but still fetch tags

We use the Python package setuptools-git-version for a variety of Python package automation steps and it runs git describe --tags --long --dirty in order to compare the HEAD commit with the most recent tag.

With checkout@v2’s default to shallow clones (a default that I agree is sensible), this no longer works, and we have to set fetch-depth: 0. This works just fine, but it would be nice if there were an option to do a shallow clone of the HEAD commit and also fetch tags.

Thanks for considering.

[devinrsmith]

I’m looking for this feature as well (the ability to git-describe the checkout), but I don’t think this can be done in a shallow manner. That said, you don’t need unrelated history; only the history related to the desired commit. Right now I’m using fetch-depth: 0 as a workaround, but that is a heavy hammer that is pulling in more than necessary.

The default checkout seems to do:

git -c protocol.version=2 fetch --no-tags --prune --progress --no-recurse-submodules --depth=1 origin +<sha>:<ref>

and I think by omitting --no-tags and --depth=1, it achieves the desired goals. (Note, that specifying --tags is not the same as omitting --no-tags.) Ie:

git -c protocol.version=2 fetch --prune --progress --no-recurse-submodules origin +<sha>:<ref>

It would be nice if there was an easy way to configure this type of checkout.

[dlech]

Setting fetch-depth: 0 seems as simple as it gets.