Comment (by Roland Haas):

Hackathon task. Easy if we can assume git >= 1.7 on all clusters (it’s from 2010, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#Releases). Namely, take my (faulty) commit that removes the current branch logic (which is fragile) and replace by a git clone -b "foo" is branch “foo” is requested.
This may also have the effect of fixing #2580 since there will no longer be a reference to “master” as the default branch in the repo.

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Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/2070/shallow-checkouts-do-not-work-with