AFAIR that's used to force Drone to do a git clone without including info about other branches or tags or anything like that, it's just cloning the branch it's told to checkout (which speeds things up a bit). Travis has a similar configuration directive.

Unfortunately Drone 1.0 has a default clone step and fails when another step is named "clone". Thus when we want to upgrade to 1.0 eventually, we have to remove that step anyway. For reference, here is an updated .drone.yml to work with 1.0: https://gist.github.com/Hackwar/a7e62e591c0a739153366b40e801be52

Well that's lame (and I dare say something Drone should address, in theory there should be some way to configure the clone directive). There is a real performance hit in requiring a full checkout/clone versus an optimized checkout, compare http://ci.joomla.org/joomla/joomla-cms/17145 (last merge to staging as of this writing) with http://ci.joomla.org/joomla/joomla-cms/17127 (build for this PR).

You might want to look at the numbers again. The one without that additional clone step is 16 seconds faster. ? Apparently there is a way to configure that, but I actually think that in 0.8 our directive is simply ignored.

Uhh, this PR is 31 seconds versus the 6 seconds for the last merge (only clone step, ignoring time variances in other steps), unless my 4-year-past-due eye exam finally needs to happen.

I don't really care what happens in the long run, but I know that a full clone of the repo is a bit pricy as far as time and CPU usage goes (and yes this is splitting hairs over a few seconds but it's only going to get worse the bigger the repository history gets) so if there's a way to keep the optimized clone that should be preferred.

ok, drone 1.0 fails with this directive in this 0.8-style drone.yml. You have to remove that step, but in 1.0 you can configure the clone step itself with a rather similar part.

clone:
  depth: 1

So I'm closing this one and hope that we can update drone soon.