[mikepurvis]

Do you actually need clones in that scenario? I worked on a build system that grabbed source from several hundred repos at the starting point, and it turned out to be way faster to just grab it all as tarballs with aria2c.

[madsbuch]

Grapping the tarbell from where? To my best knowledge, tarbell export is not a part of git, but something git hosts provide.

Git is a distributed VCS, and we should support keeping it that way.

[mikepurvis]

Almost any project you work on will have an authoritative copy of the repo in some kind of web-accessible tool, most of which provide a tarball-download function.

And GitHub's scheme is pretty much a de-facto standard at this point—GitLab's implementation is an exact copy of it, for example:

    https://<host>/<org/project>/archive/<ref/branch/tag>.tar.gz

Edit to add: Also, git-archive --remote is actually most of the way there, but it's not an HTTP download, of course. :(

[saagarjha]

GitHub doing something one way and GitLab copying it doesn't make a standard.