_commit">commits</a> have <a href="#def_parent">parents</a> cauterized away (in other
words, Git is told to pretend that these commits do not have the
parents, even though they are recorded in the <a href="#def_commit_object">commit
object</a>). This is sometimes useful when you are interested only in the
recent history of a project even though the real history recorded in the
upstream is much larger. A shallow repository
is created by giving the <code>--depth</code> option to <a href="git-clone.html">git-c