No, perhaps not. I don't think

--reference

or

--dissociate

would prevent copying the whole repo. But still I don't think we can set a depth of 1 since it's unlikely we will want the latest commit. Not sure that we can set any specific depth.

Let's take a look at Augeas, since it's one that usually fails: 1. The submodule it contains is no longer in use; gnulib has been moved outside 2. If you look at the commit causing the error, you will see it's part of the history of the main repo (and not gnulib) The shallow submodule should then be able to retrieve everything; this looks like a bug in the git implementation of the latest versions