Re: copying git repositories ...

From: Brian Gernhardt <benji@silverinsanity.com>
Date: Feb 28, 2011, 15:10 UTC
Message-ID: <43737C0D-E1B7-4036-BE39-8DF09751E22D@silverinsanity.com>
In-Reply-To: <1298903102.14697.127.camel@lenovo-w500>

On Feb 28, 2011, at 9:25 AM, Michael Meeks wrote:

> 	I'm really looking for an equivalent of 'cp -lR foo baa' that:
> 
> 	* uses hard links to save space
> 	* produces precisely-a-duplicate repository

I mostly handle this sort of thing by branch switching in the same checkout, which I assume you're trying not to do because of recompilation time.  Your way, eventually the repositories in question would start to diverge and you'd have to keep them in sync manually, which sounds far less than ideal.  Eventual repacks would break the hard links and you'd even lose the space savings.

What you might be interested in is the git-new-workdir script in git.git/contrib/workdir.  It uses symbolic links to create a new working directory backed by the exact same object store and config as the original.

This is not a situation git is well designed for, honestly.  The more "git-like" work flow would be to maintain a single central, probably bare, repository on your machine that pulls from everything that all your local repositories need.  Then set up the other repositories to get all the references from the central repo.  Then there's only one that needs to be updated from the remotes.  If you use the --reference option to git-clone, you're not even duplicating the object store and each clone only has the objects it needs.

~~ Brian