I don't know anything about how git servers are implemented, but this is super weird to me. Why couldn't you basically just copy the files (excluding .git), then do `git init`, set the upstream remote, and fetch only the most recent commit? I'm guessing it wouldn't work _exactly_ like that because the git cli is convoluted and nobody remembers the exact semantics of every flag, but it seems surprising that there aren't any possible sequences of commands that do that. Even if they implemented it on server side by just making a "fake" client locally doing this, and then sending the tarball of the repo with just that commit, it would be way more efficient than making clients download the entire history.