On 04/11, Johannes Löthberg wrote:
Since sites like GitHub stores a ref for every pull request under the refs/pull/ namespace, --mirror will pull down the history that has been part of every pull request, even after a someone has for example run git-filter-branch on it to get some big binaries out of the history, which sometimes blows the repository size and the time to clone it up by a very large factor.
Using --bare solves this as it only pulls down branches and tags, and all makepkg needs is a bare repository.
For an example of this try to clone https://github.com/Araq/Nimrod.git with --mirror and then --bare and compare the clone time and repository size. ('Too Long; Didn’t Clone': --mirror is 323M and --bare is 32M, with the former taking minutes and the second seconds.)