git grab one branch instead of everything?

Question

I found out the latest tag of something breaks code and someone has committed a fix thats in master.

I'd like to rebuild my source. How do i tell get to pull just master and not the history, etc from it?

The source is on github so as a workaround i used

 wget https://github.com/nameA/nameB/tarball/master

Answer 1

As mentioned in SO question "Partial clone with Git and Mercurial", you have to get the full history.
But you then can do a sparse checkout, in order to get only a specific path of the working tree.