Add --no-history option to avoid checking downloading full Chromium history

Description

Initial setup with npm run init downloads (among other things) a full git version history of Chromium project. This is is unnecessary as gclient supports --no-history option that checks only the most recent commit.

I propose creation of --no-history flag for all most frequently used commands (init, sync). I can prepare a corresponding PR, if you are interested (although, it’ll take a while).

Steps to Reproduce

1. Follow installation instructions
2. Observe that npm run init at one stage in the process downloads over 17 GiB of data.

Actual result:

Over 17 GiB of data downloaded. Checkout process takes a little longer than eternity.

Expected result:

Checout without history (e.g., using GitHub mirror, git clone --depth 1 [e-mail]:chromium/chromium.git) downloads less than 1 GiB of data. Checkout finishes in 3 minutes.

Reproduces how often:

Always.

Brave version (brave://version info)

N/A

Version/Channel Information:

• Can you reproduce this issue with the current release? N/A
• Can you reproduce this issue with the beta channel? N/A
• Can you reproduce this issue with the dev channel? N/A
• Can you reproduce this issue with the nightly channel? N/A

Other Additional Information:

• Does the issue resolve itself when disabling Brave Shields? N/A
• Does the issue resolve itself when disabling Brave Rewards? N/A
• Is the issue reproducible on the latest version of Chrome? N/A

Miscellaneous Information:

This is a major barrier to entry for outside contributors. I tried to contribute earlier and gave up. Now I use cloud VMs where initial setup time is especially important (because I try to decommission them when I’m not using them to save a couple bucks). @ilyaigpetrov reported similar issue in #4455. Although I don’t know if in the end compilation succeeded, I suspect it did not because he did not post any follow ups (e.g., PRs).

[bobajeff]

@Lecrapouille Thanks for the encouragement.

Yeah, I had to manually edit the files in the patches and those changes worked to make getting chromium downloaded doable but still the “gclient sync” portion is taking up my whole drive it looks like and I’m still not finished (it been at least 20 hours worth of downloading).

[Lecrapouille]

@Kwadz For Brave v1.32.96, based on your comment, I tried this following patches: 0001 is brave-browser and 0002 is for brave-core.

To apply them, I had to do this manually:

git clone https://github.com/brave/brave-browser.git --depth=1 -b $BRAVE_VERSION
cd $BRAVE_FOLDER
git am --signoff < 0001-Force-depth-1-to-reduce-size.patch

cd src
git clone https://github.com/brave/brave-core.git --depth=1 -b $BRAVE_VERSION brave
cd brave
cp $BOOTSRAP_FOLDER/patches/brave-core/0001-Force-git-cloning-brave-core-with-depth-1-to-save-di.patch .
git am --signoff < 0002-Force-git-cloning-brave-core-with-depth-1-to-save-di.patch

And after you do npm install; npm run init But this could be nice to add an option.

0001-Force-depth-1-to-reduce-size.patch.txt

0002-Force-git-cloning-brave-core-with-depth-1-to-save-di.patch.txt