Set Git submodule to shallow clone & sparse checkout?

Question

Many vendor Objective-C libraries (e.g., facebook-ios-sdk) instruct you to copy a certain subset of its repo\'s files/dirs into your Xcode project. One problem

Answer 1

You can do sparse checkouts of submodules the same way as normal sparse checkout. Just remember the sparse-checkout file for each module goes in .git/modules/<mymodule>/info/. But, as discussed in git 1.7 sparse checkout feature, sparse checkouts are exactly that: checkouts. You can't move files or share the settings.

Answer 2

Submodules can't do part of a repo. You should check out subtree merge instead.

Answer 3

With git1.8.4 (July 2013), in addition git shallow update for submodule (git submodule update --depth 1), you now can have a custom update:

In addition to the choice from "rebase, merge, or checkout-detach", "submodule update" can allow a custom command to be used in to update the working tree of submodules via the "submodule.*.update" configuration variable.

See commit 6cb5728c43f34a7348e128b44b80d00b9417cb19:

Users can set submodule.$name.update to '!command' which will cause 'command' to be run instead of checkout/merge/rebase.
This allows the user finer-grained control over how the update is done.

Signed-off-by: Chris Packham <judge.packham@gmail.com>

That means you can version a 'command' that you can then use for any submodule update (through the submodule.$name.update setting).
That script can do a sparse checkout if you want.

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Update August 2016 (3 years later)

With Git 2.10 (Q3 2016), you will be able to do

 git config -f .gitmodules submodule.<name>.shallow bool

See "Git submodule without extra weight" for more.