Git submodule without extra weight

Question

I'm not a Git master yet, faced a problem I can't figure out how to fix. I have a repo with my WordPress custom skeleton and I've added WordPress as a submodule from its original repo by git submodule add wp_repo_url. When I clone my repo to local machine with:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/user/repo local_dir

it downloads the WP submodule as expected, but here's the problem - actual files are only 20.7Mb, and in .git/modules/core/objects/pack I've got a huge 124Mb .pack file, which, I suppose, is smth like commit history / revisions of that submodule.

How can I re-add submodule or modify while cloning to prevent downloading this extra weight?

UPDATE:

With the help of @iclmam I've came up with the following setup:

• my skeleton repo will have WordPress as a submodule, the whole original repo with history
• when creating a new project from skeleton, I'll clone it without --recursive option to get only the main files and empty folder for submodule
• IF I need WordPress with full history - for example, if I need to switch between different WP branches/tags to test my plugin/theme backward compatibility - then I'll get this submodule with full history

• if I just need a plain clean install of recent WP version, I'll change into wp directory and go the old way:

  curl -L -O http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
  unzip latest.zip 
  mv wordpress/* .
  rm latest.zip  
  rm -rf wordpress
  

Not a perfect solution (I wanted to automate everything as much as possible), but it works for now.

Any advices on the original question are appreciated.

Answer 1

since Git 2.10+ (Q3 2016), you will be able to do a regular clone... and still benefit from shallow clone for submodules.

All you need to do is record that configuration in your .gitmodules:

git config -f .gitmodules submodule.<name>.shallow true

Add, commit, and push: anyone cloning your repo (regular clone, full history) will get only a depth of 1 for the submodule <name>.

See commit f6fb30a, commit abed000 and commit 37f52e9 (03 Aug 2016) by Stefan Beller (stefanbeller).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit dc7e09a, 08 Aug 2016)}

> submodule update: learn --[no-]recommend-shallow option

Sometimes the history of a submodule is not considered important by the projects upstream. To make it easier for downstream users, allow a boolean field 'submodule.<name>.shallow' in .gitmodules, which can be used to recommend whether upstream considers the history important.

This field is honored in the initial clone by default, it can be ignored by giving the --no-recommend-shallow option.