I am trying to git clone the LibreOffice codebase, but at the moment I have an internet connection of about 300kbps and it's just anything but stable. I can get the connection back any moment, but then the git clone process already stopped working, and no way to get it running again. Is there some way to have a more failure-resistant git clone download?
One option I considered myself is to download someone else's .git directory, but that is overly dependent of others and doesn't seem like the best possible solution to me.
I don't think this is ready yet. There's an old GSoC page that which planned to implement your desired feature. My best bet is, like you suggested download it as a directory. I'm assuming you are able to resume downloads over other protocols.
Restartable Clone
When cloning a large repository (such as KDE, Open Office, Linux kernel) there is currently no way to restart an interrupted clone. It may take considerable time for a user on the end of a small pipe to download the data, and if the clone is interrupted in the middle the user currently needs to start over from the beginning and try again. For some users this may make it impossible to clone a large repository.
Goal: Allow git-clone to automatically resume a previously failed download over the native git:// protocol. Language: C Mentor: Shawn Pearce Suggested by: Shawn Pearce on gmane
Along with the shallow cloning (git clone --depth=1) suggestion in one of the other answers it may be helpful if someone can make a bare repository for you if you can communicate with the provider. You can easily convert the bare repository to a full repository. Also read the comments in that answer as a shallow clone may not always help.