Re: Multiple working trees with GIT ?

From: Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>
Date: Jan 24, 2008, 12:59 UTC
Message-ID: <20080124125905.GC13247@1wt.eu>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0801240947230.14173@reaper.quantumfyre.co.uk>

Hi Julian,

On Thu, Jan 24, 2008 at 09:59:05AM +0000, Julian Phillips wrote: (...)

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> >This works pretty well. I can simply cd worktree/variant_a and work on a
> >file, or pull master, or even git-cherry-pick from other branches (pretty
> >convenient for this usage). But I don't know what caveats I may encounter.
> 
> You might want to have a look at the git-new-workdir script in contrib, it 
> does basically the same thing.  It's been there for about 10 months now. 
> It was based on an email from Junio:
> 
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/41513/

Interesting lecture, thanks for the pointer. At least now I know that it is not too much exotic.

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> However, there are some caveats about using this approach, basically about 
> the fact that there is nothing stopping you from updating refs that are 
> currently checked out in another directory and causing yourself all sorts 
> of pain ... the topic has cropped up a couple of times on the list since 
> the script was added.

hmmm good point. Given that I'm used to push into remote working dirs and to get caught by this problem, I think I would most often escape from the caveat, but we should take care of not trapping newbies.

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> >Maybe there are other solutions too. I see that we tend to replace symlinks
> >everywhere with ref files. We might as well (in a far future version) 
> >accept
> >a file for ".git" which would contain a path to the central repo and the
> >branch's head.
> 
> There was a suggestion for something not too dissimilar even before the 
> new-workdir script:
> 
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/33755

OK, thank you for your links. I still think I will wo the easy way for now, probably using git-new-workdir, waiting for a general consensus on the subject.

Regards, Willy