@philpem Maybe this is something to point the #git maintainers towards as an issue?
https://git-scm.com/community
Tho this may be an architectural limitation or decided-upon explicit goal:
As with most other distributed version control systems, and unlike most client–server systems, Git maintains a local copy of the entire repository, also known as the "repo", with history and version-tracking abilities, independent of network access or a central server.
So I'm not shure if "clone only history between commit A / branch A and commit B / Branch B" is even possible, cuz whilst git does support parallell, distributed and non-linear workflows, it's having a central, linear branch-based versioning and may just be unable to facilitate that without having the previous history on hand.
- If #Subversion can do that, then expect it to be explicitly unsupported in
git, because @torvalds basically spec'd git with the words 'if in doubt, do the opposite of Subversion'…