From: George Spelvin <linux@horizon.com>
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2010 04:59:30 GMT
Subject: Re: Newbie question
Message-ID: <20100923045930.16223.qmail@science.horizon.com>

Jakub Narebski wrote:
> You have the repository itself (the object database containg all
> version info plus other info).  Put those files and directories into
> <project>/.git subdirectory, and use "git checkout" from within it.
> You should have checked out files in <project>/ directory.

What he said.  Cloning it in the first place is the easier approach, but
what happened is that you got a copy of a "bare" repostitory (without
checked-out files, suitable only for remote access), which is typically
in a directory named "project.git".

What you want is a normal tree, where all the git files are in "project/.git"

This is pretty easy to do:

mkdir project
mv project.git project/.git
cd project
git config core.bare true
git checkout

That does 3 things:
- Set up the directory structure correctly,
- unset the core.bare flag, which disables certain commands that
  make no sense on a bare repository, and
- Check out a working copy