Re: The shared Git repo used by git-new-workdir

From: Holger Hellmuth <hellmuth@ira.uka.de>
Date: Jan 16, 2012, 18:09 UTC
Message-ID: <4F1467C1.504@ira.uka.de>
In-Reply-To: <CAE1pOi3fBUBeNuhJqtJhxuMfz2G3iYOJy7U2HX6Nv4kqjcbnhw@mail.gmail.com>

On 14.01.2012 21:59, Hilco Wijbenga wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> Hi all,
>
> First off, I use git-new-workdir a lot and it's working great. Kudos
> to its developers!
>
> I have been looking at the Git clone that is at the root of
> git-new-workdir (i.e. the repository that is reused by all my
> git-new-workdir created directories). This repo shows a lot of
> activity when I run "git status" there.
>
> So now I'm wondering. Should I simply ignore this completely? Or is
> there some "clean up" I can do so that "git status" shows nothing? Or
> would I destroy my git-new-workdir directories doing that? So far I've
> only used this repo to create branches (i.e. to run git-new-workdir).
>
> I would like to understand a bit better how I should treat this repo.
> Whether it's basically a "do-not-touch" environment or whether I can
> safely treat it as a normal Git repo.

Take a look at the rather simple script git-new-workdir (everything important happens in the last 20 lines). It just makes logical links to all files (mostly directories) under .git except three files that relate to the index (mainly the index file itself and HEAD)

That would suggest that normal git operations operating on files in those directories happen identical whether you are in the root repo or in any of the satellites. Only where the whole repo is acted upon (git clone, cp/rsync or deletion of the whole repo) the root repo would be "special".