Download only subdirectory for GitHub packages when appropriate

[jashapiro]

When installing a package from GitHub where the package is in a subdirectory of the main repository, pak::pkg_install() downloads the entire repository. For some repositories this may be a non-issue, but if the repository is large (and the R package is only a small part of the repository), this may result in a long, slow download.

Might it be possible to implement a sparse-checkout or equivalent to reduce downloads and improve install times in this situation?

[gaborcsardi]

Try a git:: remote, that possibly already does a sparse checkout.

It is hard to do a sparse checkout for github:: because there is no good way in the GH API to do that.

[jashapiro]

It does not seem that the git:: remotes in pak allow subdirectories? I did test whether remotes::install_git with a subdirectory specified used a sparse checkout, but it does not seem to.

[jashapiro]

Or rather, maybe a sparse checkout isn't quite what I want, as that seems to still download the whole .git folder, which can be large.