I've reassigned this ticket to Architecture. Brian Van Klaveren given your recent work on lsst_build can you please comment on the status of this ticket?

This is definitely possible after RFC-714 (it was not possible before) - it's only about 30 minutes of work

The only questions I would care about in implementing this today would be:

1. What should the default checkout/prepare behavior(s) be (sometimes they are different in jenkins vs. developer workflows)
2. What are the command-line flags

(2) is leads to a bigger question because prepare has a lot of flags already, and we also tend to hide CLI complexity behind rebuild rather in lsstsw than using a config file or something for lsst_build

I'd be inclined to say that the default should stay the same but jenkins can use a command-line switch (it's much easier to change jenkins).

I tried a naive approach to this - just using "--depth=1" in the git clone commands. Because we do a few git operations (A clone and a fetch with some hacking for git-lfs credential workaround) the naive approach wasn't any faster. I will have to see what we can do to improve the situation.