When I was getting the code in the previous post ready to share, I ran into a problem: my checkouts of LLVM and Swift were shallow clones, i.e. git repositories that don’t store the full history of each branch. Working with those locally is surprisingly easy; trying to set them up on a server using git push is a bit trickier. While trying to figure out what was going on, I was dismayed by the lack of up-to-date documentation about shallow repositories, even on my usual go-to site, git-scm.com. So here’s a collection of information I’ve gathered about shallow repositories.

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In my last post I talked about how I was disappointed I wouldn’t be able to post my toy projects on GitHub, since GitHub supports ICE. I did get a few recommendations for other places to host Git repositories, but—at least partly inspired by Tom Ryder’s “Why Not GitHub?”—I decided to take the plunge and set up my own hosting. After all, these aren’t big collaborative projects; they’re “just” projects whose revision history I’m willing to share. In all cases so far, I’m the only author, even.

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If you’ve been running your own server for a while, eventually you’ll start getting privacy jitters and want to use HTTPS, at which point you’ll either happily set it up with minimal difficulty (if you’re running a single site) or realize frustratedly that you can’t use HTTPS with name-based virtual hosts. To quote the Apache site:

The reason is very technical, and a somewhat “chicken and egg” problem. The SSL protocol layer stays below the HTTP protocol layer and encapsulates HTTP. When an SSL connection (HTTPS) is established Apache/mod_ssl has to negotiate the SSL protocol parameters with the client. For…

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