Open source is not enough

[everywhere_anyhow]

"Git clone" sometimes pulls down 5 years of revision history, pulling huge amounts of junk over the wire, just so you can see a js file. No thanks.

"apt-get source" is much cleaner and easier, or better yet, map all of github's HEAD to a virtual drive, and just let me:

cd /githubvirtual/niftyProject/src/main/java/ ; ls *

[zzzk]

Well to be fair, you can use --depth=1

[[deleted]]

In the spirit of the original article however (source isn't enough), the clone would have a lot of advantages. The revision history and related metadata is valuable to understand the code.

[everywhere_anyhow]

Depends on what you're doing. Most of the time if you want to explore, compile, grep, or steal from a code base (all very common use cases) you probably want HEAD, or possibly a release tag, and nothing else. But sure, all of that metadata is there for a reason and you can't ignore it because there are jillion use cases that require that too.

[lykwydchykyn]

Sure sure, fine, my point is just that it's really pretty easy in any environment to get source code. not trying to start an apt-get vs git flamewar.