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

github, wireshark

Solution

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

Problem

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?

Original source

Related problems