Fetch specific commit fails in shallow repositories

Question

I've a shallow clone of a submodule repository where the desired commit is on an unrelated branch to the HEAD commit.

git submodule update --init --depth 1

This works for most submodules, but the ones, where HEAD has an unrelated history to the desired commit, it fails: When git tries to fetch the needed commit it gives the error: error: Server does not allow request for unadvertised object

The same error occurs also without submodules

git clone --depth 1 <url> prj
cd prj
git fetch origin <hash>
> error: Server does not allow request for unadvertised object

The following works fine:

git clone <url> prj
cd prj
git checkout <hash>

Any Idea, how to get shallow submodules working when they have unrelated commits? As we are having many submodules used with different internal structures, a manual treatment per submodule is not feasible.

Answer 1

If you control the server, set it up to allow fetch-by-hash-ID.

If not, stop using shallow submodules (or make them deep enough so that the problem does not occur). That's pretty much it.