branch - git shallow clone (clone --depth) misses remote branches

Question

After cloning a remote repository it does not show any remote branch by -a option. What could be the problem? How to debug it? In this snippet two of the remote branches are not shown:

$ git clone --depth 1 git://git.savannah.gnu.org/pythonwebkit.git
$ cd pythonwebkit
$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/master
$ git --version
git version 1.8.3.1

Tried the same command on another machine, it works well:

$ git clone --depth 1 git://git.savannah.gnu.org/pythonwebkit.git
Receiving objects: 100% (186886/186886), 818.91 MiB | 3.44 MiB/s, done.
$ cd pythonwebkit/
$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/debian
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/python_codegen
$ git --version
git version 1.7.1

Tried also cloning another repo, it works well. Though I can try it on this machine again, but it would be better to know what's wrong.

Any suggestions or hints will be more than welcome.

Edit: Answer summary: Since git version 1.8.3.2 the "--depth" and "--no-single-branch" need to be used together to get the same behavior as before. This is deemed a bug fix.

Answer 1

After doing a shallow clone, to be able to checkout other branches from remote,

1. Run (thanks @jthill):

   git remote set-branches origin '*'
   

2. After that, do a git fetch -v

3. Finally git checkout the-branch-i-ve-been-looking-for

---

Step 1 can also be done manually by editing .git/config.

For instance, change the folloing line from:

fetch = +refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master

to (replace master with *):

fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*