no shallow is --shallow. the difference is --depth refers to the history (as reported by, e.g. git log), whereas shallow will only check out the root of the repository and any paths explicitly specified. i guess the article is describing some sort of problem with users who convert their shallow repository to a regular full repo. i wouldn’t know a lot about that.
honestly, having just tested it, i think the solution might be as simple as --depth=1. for me, the clone time of some repos went from several minutes down to instant. even without that, there’s no reason in my mind why the filesystem can’t be used as a database, just with its own non-git tooling.
i was gonna be shocked that nix doesn’t store its own output hashes but then i realized guix doesn’t either. it seems really odd to me for a reproducible build package manager not to do that. i wonder what caused that decision.
oh that’s my fault. i confused shallow with sparse (
--sparse). my bad.