Can I checkout a repo and only a subset of its git submodules?

[vyas-n]

Hey folks,

Sorry, I'm not sure if this is currently possible.

I have a repository (A) that is set up with the following submodules (B, C, D) that are the following sizes

A: 2MiB
B: 3MiB
C: 40KiB
D: 2GiB

flowchart LR
  A["A (2 MiB)"] --> B["B (3 MiB)"] & C["C (40 KiB)"]  & D["D (2 GiB)"] 

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Submodule D is huge and generally not necessary for most of our CI jobs.
However, I still need to clone Submodules B & C for most CI jobs.

Is there a recommended approach to only cloning a subset of submodules using the actions/checkout GitHub action?