On Sat, Oct 20, 2018 at 11:24:24PM -0400, Maxim Cournoyer wrote:
> ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> > On closer inspection, it seems that there’s nothing “fatal” here: if you
> > let it run for a while (1 or 2 minutes), it ends up silently cloning the
> > whole repo and the derivation build eventually succeeds.
> 
> It did end up working fine, although it took a large amout of time for
> doing what seems to be a checkout (4 min 46 s). I did some experiments
> and this is really the time it took to do a full clone of the libssh
> project.

Great, you figured it out :)

More explanation:

Git has a few different server protocols: git, dumb HTTP, smart HTTP,
and SSH:

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protocols

The dumb HTTP protocol is slow and does not show any progress status or
other informative message while it works, but if you monitor your
network traffic you can see it working.

For obvious reasons, it's rare to see the dumb HTTP protocol deployed
nowadays, but you may still find it on legacy installations.