Re: Minor missing features in worktree compare to new-workdir

From: Paul Smith <paul@mad-scientist.net>
Date: Jun 14, 2017, 12:41 UTC
Message-ID: <1497444089.13409.108.camel@mad-scientist.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAMvDr+Qxjdgnm0aW3WenDpFs2NBhyrNXZA2M7sjsCjJs+RzM3Q@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, 2017-06-14 at 08:31 -0400, Yichao Yu wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 1. the branch name in new-workdir has the same behavior as checkout,
> i.e. when it matches a remote branch name a local branch tracking that
> remote branch will be created and checked out. worktree gives an error
> in this case. This is very useful for fetching someone else' feature
> branch into a different work dir for testing.

I agree; this behavior of worktree is frustrating. It's a very common use-case to aid in code reviews etc. and it's not easy to explain to people what they need to do to make this work.

> 2. worktree doesn't seem to support multiple worktree on the same
> branch.

I think this is a very good thing about worktrees as opposed to workdirs.

In a situation where I may want multiple worktrees pointing to the same commit I just check out the SHA rather than the branch: you can have as many branches set to the same SHA (detached HEAD) as you like, and there's no concern about dirty workspaces. This latter can actually be a really big problem (suppose the workdir contained some modified files then you update another workdir with the same branch... it's not easy to figure out what happened here!)