Re: Stat cache in .git/index hinders syncing of repositories

On 2020-01-18 at 19:06:21, Christoph Groth wrote:

Git is going to perform really terribly on repositories of any size if you disable stat caching, so we're not very likely to implement such a feature. Even if we did implement it, you probably wouldn't want to use it.

However, there are the core.checkStat and core.trustctime options which can control which information is used in the stat caching. You can restrict it to the whole second part of mtime and the file size if you want. See git-config(1) for more details.

Note that this assumes that (a) your sync tool can honor mtimes and (b) that your sync tool syncs to another system of the same type. You may still run into problems if you share files between Linux and Windows because symbolic links are different sizes there. (This also bites WSL.) Since rsync can do the former, I think it's a reasonable expectation that other tools can as well.

One final word of caution: you probably want to activate your sync tool only manually and only when the repository is idle. Tools like Dropbox that automatically sync files one by one have been known to corrupt repositories because the way they sync data leaves the repository in an inconsistent state and doesn't honor standard POSIX file system semantics which Git relies on for integrity.

Hopefully with that information you can find a configuration and tool that work for you.