How do you configure Jenkins to use git archive instead of git clone with Gerrit?

We have an automated build system configured using Jenkins开发者_高级运维, integrate with Gerrit. One of the bottlenecks today is that it takes ~3.5 minutes for Jenkins to complete a "git clone" for each build, due to repository size. The same check-out using "git archive" takes approx 12 seconds.

Can the gerrit plugin for Jenkins be configured to use "git archive"? This will significantly reduce our build time.

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Although it doesn't appear to be possible using an unmodified version of the Git plugin, I did accomplish this in two steps:

1) Change SCM to "None" for the particular job.
2) Add a build step at the beginning to checkout using "git archive"

Here is a sample for step 2).

git archive --format=tar --remote=git://host/repo ${GERRIT_REFSPEC} > ${BUILD_ID}.tar && tar xvf ${BUILD_ID}.tar && rm ${BUILD_ID}.tar