git checkout could/should be done with --depth=1

pip can install directly from git, great!

When pip installs from git, it downloads the entire history of the git branch - when all it wants is the target version. I believe this can be achieved using the --depth=1 flag to various git subcommands. The speedup on projects with a long history can be significant.

[naught101]

For anyone using pip git installs a lot right now, who can’t wait, and who doesn’t care about setuptools_scm, you can just hack this this as a work-around. Just replace line 142 in <python-lib-path>/pip/vcs/git.py:

            self.run_command(['clone', '-q', url, dest])

with

            self.run_command(['clone', '--depth=1', url, dest])

Dodgy, but it saves me 20 minutes on a statsmodel install…

[mrmachine]

@dstufft caching entire repos does not solve the underlying motivation for this, at least for me. I use Docker a lot these days, and build a lot of projects in Docker images that often pip install editable requirements (because for example, you must make a requirement editable to include in a requirements.in file for use with pip-tools (which admittedly is not really pip’s problem, but we need to use it to work around some other pip limitations e.g. “first-found” nested dependency conflict resolution).

I don’t want or need to download let alone bake into the image, the entire 25,000 commit, 220 MB Django repository, for example.