From: Junio C Hamano Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:32:14 GMT Subject: Re: git clone -l Message-ID: <7vd4qa3t9t.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: Daniel Barkalow writes: > What, exactly, is -l supposed to do for clone? As far as I can tell, we > automatically do the local magic if we can. Would it be okay to make > "local" default to "if possible", have "-l" mean error if not possible, > and have "--no-local" able to avoid using local magic even if we could use > it? It used to be that "-l" meant "When it is local, use hardlink if possible otherwise copy without complaining, as either are cheaper than the pack piped to unpack." Lack of -l meant no local magic. Recently lack of -l stopped to mean "no local magic". We still do the local magic, but we do not do hardlinks and instead do copies. An "-l" that asks clone across filesystems still falls back to copying but now gets a warning. "--no-hardlinks" does not have any significance anymore, as that is what you would get for a local clone without -l. The way to refuse local magic is to use file://$path/ explicitly; we do not have --no-local.