How to use git sparse-checkout in 2.27+

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I believe I found the reason for this. Commit f56f31af0301 to Git changed the implementation of sparse-checkout so that, when you have an uninitialized working tree (as you would right after running git clone --no-checkout), running git sparse-checkout init will not check out any files into your working tree. In previous versions, the command would actually check out files, which could have unexpected effects given that you wouldn’t have an active branch at that point.

The relevant commit, f56f31af0301 was included in Git 2.27, but not in 2.25. That accounts for why the behavior you see is not the behavior shown on the web page you’re trying to follow. Basically, the behavior on the web page was a bug that nobody realized was a bug at the time, but with Git 2.27, it has been fixed.

This is explained very well, I think, in the message for commit b5bfc08a972d:

So…that brings us to the special case: a git clone performed with
--no-checkout. As per the meaning of the flag, --no-checkout does not
check out any branch, with the implication that you aren’t on one and
need to switch to one after the clone. Implementationally, HEAD is
still set (so in some sense you are partially on a branch), but

  • the index is “unborn” (non-existent)
  • there are no files in the working tree (other than .git/)
  • the next time git switch (or git checkout) is run it will run
    unpack_trees with initial_checkout flag set to true.

It is not until you run, e.g. git switch <somebranch> that the index
will be written and files in the working tree populated.

With this special --no-checkout case, the traditional read-tree -mu HEAD
behavior would have done the equivalent of acting like checkout —
switch to the default branch (HEAD), write out an index that matches
HEAD, and update the working tree to match. This special case slipped
through the avoid-making-changes checks in the original sparse-checkout
command and thus continued there.

After update_sparsity() was introduced and used (see commit f56f31a
(“sparse-checkout: use new update_sparsity() function“, 2020-03-27)),
the behavior for the --no-checkout case changed: Due to git’s
auto-vivification of an empty in-memory index (see do_read_index() and
note that must_exist is false), and due to sparse-checkout‘s
update_working_directory() code to always write out the index after it
was done, we got a new bug. That made it so that sparse-checkout would
switch the repository from a clone with an “unborn” index (i.e. still
needing an initial_checkout), to one that had a recorded index with no
entries. Thus, instead of all the files appearing deleted in git status
being known to git as a special artifact of not yet being on a
branch, our recording of an empty index made it suddenly look to git as
though it was definitely on a branch with ALL files staged for deletion!
A subsequent checkout or switch then had to contend with the fact that
it wasn’t on an initial_checkout but had a bunch of staged deletions.

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