From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 17:26:35 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] clone: Skip pack-*.keep files when cloning locally
Message-ID: <7vzju3ftbo.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <CAEef6WxnRbPVFgZP4asQrvYGVTTbGzeQCwPJrwj4a-6k9vFcbQ@mail.gmail.com>

Jens Lindström <jl@opera.com> writes:

> On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 6:20 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>> I am not sure if we should care that deeply about them in the first
>> place.
>
> Fine by me; I don't really have a strong opinion on the matter.
>
>> Besides, I think you can make a hardlink to a file that you cannot
>> read.
>
> Not always.  The Linux kernel can at least be configured not to allow
> it.  It seems this is enabled by default in at least Debian.

You learn a new thing every day, I guess.  I am on Debian, I do not
think I did any customization in that area, and I can hardlink just
fine.

> This restriction had me a bit confused when I was testing variations
> here; I expected all "access denied" failures to be because of .keep
> files, but in fact creating hardlinks to other files (.idx and .pack)
> failed too, even though they were readable.  

Is it possible that you are tripping cross-device link?  The reason
why we have "attempt to hardlink but fall back to copy" is exactly
because it is fairly common that people try local-cheap clone without
realizing the source and the destination may be on separate filesystems.