• I've read and understood the *CONTRIBUTING guidelines and have done my best effort to follow.

Right now whenever you run pod update and have dependencies against a git branch, pods always clones the target repository. This happens even if the target commit is cached. Using git ls-remote you can query the repository for the current commit the target branch points to, and avoid cloning if that particular version is in pods cache.

I already have a proof of concept patch for this, but before sending it I'd like to know if this would be accepted. I also seriously doubt the patch would survive code review, so I'd have some questions regarding it if it's acceptable.