Short version: I miss the possibility to give "--depth 1" as clone option Longer version: It seems to me that you always promote to clone the full repository, even if you didn't intend to start hacking but to compile your own bleeding edge KDE stuff. I know, nowadays they always say hard disk space is cheap. but some still care. How much can be saved certainly varies from module to module. As example kauth: 25MB vs 0.5MB Background: I like to start hacking on Kate and followed so far this guide https://kate-editor.org/build-it/. That will end up in a 70GB tree, as Christoph told me. Way too much for my taste. Most of the space is probably wasted by unnecessary debug configuration of the dependencies-only modules. But that could probably be fixed with a configuration file where every thing is build in release mode and only kate and ktexteditor in debug mode. I'm afraid that would still be too much trouble for me, but others would benefit. Fetch and compile more than 70 modules just to hack on two parts? :-( Some years ago, I coded already on Kate. The trick back there was to tweak CMakeLists.txt to use an older KF5 version. But shortly we had a situation where that didn't work due to modified include header. Would be best when not always the latest KF5 version is required. But Christoph explained to me that this would complicate the development even more. Crap! However, here a patch for those who like to compare the size of the resulting source tree. I only fetched the mentioned kauth, for more I'm right now not in the mood. Clone all repositories as shallow with depth 1 diff --git a/modules/ksb/Updater/Git.pm b/modules/ksb/Updater/Git.pm index 06891e3..a8db0e3 100644 --- a/modules/ksb/Updater/Git.pm +++ b/modules/ksb/Updater/Git.pm @@ -94,7 +94,7 @@ sub _clone my $git_repo = shift; my $module = $self->module(); my $srcdir = $module->fullpath('source'); - my @args = ('--', $git_repo, $srcdir); + my @args = ('--depth', '1', '--', $git_repo, $srcdir); my $ipc = $self->{ipc} // croak_internal ('Missing IPC object');