Hi Glenn, > The gnulib sources are large but more importantly have lots of changes. So > initial checkout of the repository can take a long time when network or > cpu resources are limited. The later is especially acute in a non-KVM QEMU > virtual machine (which can take 40+ minutes compared to <30 seconds with > this change[1]). The problem is specific to bootstrap configurations using > a specific gnulib revision specified by commit hash.
The change looks reasonable, but is hardly self-explanatory. Could you please add parts of the commit message to comments in the code? So that one does not need to look in the git history in order to understand the code. Also, I would expect that the GNULIB_REVISION environment variable is not so frequently used, and that the more frequent use is with git submodules. Is it possible to apply the same trick to the git submodules case? Or does the use of submodules always require a deep clone? Bruno
