[jmholla]

I'm confused. Git does have built-in support for shallow clones:

    git clone --depth=1 $repository

will only fetch the latest versions of files.

You can even use the `--filter=tree:0` option to `git clone` with `git sparse-checkout` to only fetch subsets of the repository.

[tdrhq]

Yes, but our SaaS tool required our customers to not use sparse or shallow checkouts since we needed the git commit-graph.

Using upload-pack allowed us to remove that constraint, since even in a shallow clone we can still get the commit graph via SSH from the remote.

[jmholla]

But your post seemed to indicate you already had access to the commit graph. Is this just about getting that information without depending on APIs?