Why do GitHub actions need to fetch the whole repository history?

[nh13]

I am confused why we need to the full repository history when checking out the repository via GitHub actions. It takes nearly a minute to checkout the repository will all its history. When the --git-range argument is used (e.g. with bioconda-utils), then we may need the last two commits. When we do need to compare it against the master branch (or base branch), it looks like it is fetched manually. Hopefully this is any easy speed up to the build process?