So why not introduce a semi-shallow clone option? If I'm doing a shallow clone it isn't because I only want to receive a specific commit, it's because I don't

So why not introduce a semi-shallow clone option? If I'm doing a shallow clone it isn't because I only want to receive a specific commit, it's because I don't want to burn a giant amount of disk space and network traffic on a full history. In most use cases it would be perfectly acceptable for the server to send additional data. The client doesn't care about it because it is meaningless to them, but if it results in a significant load reduction on the server's side they don't really mind receiving it either. A 100MB shallow checkout coming with 400MB of garbage still beats cloning an entire 5GB history!