Why is the size of the forked repository so huge in GitHub?

Question

I am a newbie to github and I am required to have an understanding of wireshark by analyzing its source code. The source code is apparently around 23 MB but if I try to do a git clone from the link provided in the website, it turns out to be around 636 MB.

Can someone please shed some light as to why the clone is so big compared to the source code?

Answer 1

When you clone a repository with git ... that's what you're doing; cloning a repository. You're getting all the branches and their histories, not just master.

If you really wanted to, you could just get master (or a specific branch) - see: Clone only one branch