The following doesn't work out of the box:

$ git clone git://github.com/jquery/jquery.git

$ cd jquery && make

The result is:

andy@andy:~$ git clone git://github.com/jquery/jquery.git 
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/andy/jquery/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 10169, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3145/3145), done.
remote: Total 10169 (delta 6668), reused 9955 (delta 6526)
Receiving objects: 100% (10169/10169), 4.91 MiB | 438 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (6668/6668), done.
andy@andy:~$ cd jquery/
andy@andy:~/jquery$ make
Grabbing external dependencies...
Submodule 'src/sizzle' (git://github.com/jeresig/sizzle.git) registered for path 'src/sizzle'
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/andy/jquery/src/sizzle/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 889, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (860/860), done.
remote: Total 889 (delta 567), reused 57 (delta 10)
Receiving objects: 100% (889/889), 443.19 KiB | 158 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (567/567), done.
Submodule path 'src/sizzle': checked out '3e97c27d19e18c984a29bfea89fcccadf3544fb3'
You asked me to pull without telling me which branch you
want to merge with, and 'branch..merge' in
your configuration file does not tell me either.  Please
name which branch you want to merge on the command line and
try again (e.g. 'git pull <repository> <refspec>').
See git-pull(1) for details on the refspec.
If you often merge with the same branch, you may want to
configure the following variables in your configuration
file:

    branch..remote = <nickname>
    branch..merge = <remote-ref>
    remote.<nickname>.url = <url>
    remote.<nickname>.fetch = <refspec>

See git-config(1) for details.
make: *** [init] Error 1
andy@andy:~/jquery$ 

There are 2 errors:

1. the submodule cannot be pulled

2. After fixing that there's a broken symlink for qunit

The following commit rectifies these issues: http://github.com/AD7six/jquery/commit/0322b6c2610b456e4a203c47e4f6b16564af3bab