Re: Having Git follow symlinks

From: Matthew Ruffalo <mmr15@case.edu>
Date: Jan 31, 2014, 13:20 UTC
Message-ID: <52EBA304.3000205@case.edu>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.00.1401311052370.3993@ds9.cixit.se>

On 01/31/2014 04:56 AM, Peter Krefting wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> Matthieu Moy:
>
>> One option is to have the symlink in the other direction: make
>> /etc/foo a symlink to $GIT_WORKTREE/foo and version the later.
>
> I do that for the software that supports it, but ssh, for instance, is
> very picky that ~/.ssh is a directory and such. And at least one of
> the other files I version-control will be unlinked and overwritten in
> such a way that that does not work.
>
> I could split the repo up (that seems to be what "vcsh" is doing) and
> check the parts out in the corresponding directories, but I do like
> the idea of having one single repo.
>
>
> Oh, well, if I have the time, maybe I can come up with a patch. There
> is already some hacks in the "core.symlinks" setting, so I guess it
> should be possible.
>

This is now unrelated to Git, but I have .ssh symlinked to a version-controlled directory on all of my machines (Kubuntu 13.10, 14.04, and recent Gentoo systems, but I've also done this on CentOS 5 and 6).

SSH doesn't care whether ~/.ssh is a symlink, but it *does* //care about permissions:

""" mruffalo@giygas:~$ ls -ld .ssh lrwxrwxrwx 1 mruffalo mruffalo 13 Mar 17 2013 .ssh -> .home-git/ssh mruffalo@giygas:~$ ls -ld .home-git drwx------ 1 mruffalo mruffalo 116 Dec 8 01:26 .home-git """

If .home-git is mode 0755, SSH may refuse to use any private keys that it finds, though I was unable to reproduce this with a few quick tests.

MMR...