Somewhat investigative question:
Can one recover a shallow git repository from a GitHub source tarball?
Desired further steps: download only the latest commit object and be able to create and push new commits to the original repo with stock git (of course viewing history wouldn't work because it's not downloaded).
Thanks!
Clarification: one can download the refs, commit trees etc from GitHub api, but wishes to limit the number of requests sufficient for creating and pushing a new commit using standard git client.