What this is not about:

Before blobless and treeless checkouts were a thing, people requested support for shallow clones (`--depth=1` or so). Since that option breaks a bunch of git functionality, that request was denied repeatedly, e.g. in  FS#34677 .

This feature request isn’t about that, and the arguments used to dismiss those requests don’t apply here.

What this is about:

These days, git supports other kinds of volume friendly clones: partial clones, which come as blobless (`git clone --filter=blob:none <url>`) and treeless (`git clone --filter=tree:0 <url>`). https://github.blog/2020-12-21-get-up-to-speed-with-partial-clone-and-shallow-clone/#user-content-quick-summary

These kinds of clone don’t have the drawbacks that shallow clones have: All operations work as expected, the only difference is that on clone, only the blobs (and in case of treeless also trees) of the newest commit of the initially cloned branch are downloaded, so operations accessing the blobs in other branches than the initially downloaded ones need network access.

I use these options for development a lot, in big repositories they save a lot of time and disk space. It would be great if users could select the default clone filter in either PKGBUILDs or makepkg.conf (or both).