Re: can anybody explain the following to a git noob?

From: Tim Uckun <timuckun@gmail.com>
Date: May 23, 2009, 08:21 UTC
Message-ID: <855e4dcf0905230121h28ef22f8n4758953e612325cf@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LNX.2.00.0905221244370.2147@iabervon.org>

>
> Obviously, there's more before the transcript started; otherwise, there
> would be nothing to import in the initial commit, and there certainly
> wouldn't be .git directories that came from nowhere.

Sorry. The command before git init is svn export  blah/blah/blah/

I am taking a rails project and putting it under git. The .git files are there in the pluging because the plugins are hosted on github and they ware installed via git clone.

I know people keep mentioning those directories so I want to repeat myself. I renamed the test directory which had no .git folders anywhere in them. It contains the tests for the rails project and nothing else.

Show 7 quoted lines

> I don't think any
> version control system I know of likes having your initial import be of a
> directory with other working directories for the same system as
> subdirectories. (That is, Mercurial will be fine having git working
> directories in the import, but git won't, and Mercurial wouldn't be happy
> about having Mercurial working directories as subdirectories).
>

I now realize that. I did however did the same thing again but first deleted all the .git directories before doing a git init. The end result didn't change.

>> > In this case, when you checkout the
>> > branch that does not have test_new, only the tracked files are removed;
>> > the ignored (i.e untracked) files remain. Therefore, after the checkout
>> > you still have a test_new directory.

I now understand that this is the way git works. I wasn't expecting this though. I was exptecting the master branch to look like it was before I switched to another branch and mucked around.

As I said in a previous email mercurial worked as I was expecting. Subversion also works the way I expected. Coming from subversion I never expected git to carry the new directory name into the original branch.

The way I have always thought about branches was that they are isolated from other branches and it surprised me greatly when git "leaked" the new directory from the "my_branch" branch into master.

I still kind of think I did something wrong. This behavior seems extremely odd to me.

> This tends to happen if, while on a different branch, you editted some
> files and left editor backups or compiled (maybe just-in-time) files in
> that directory. Then there are files in the directory that don't belong to
> any branch, since they're not source files.

I didn't edit any files. I didn't compile anything. There should have been on artifacts of any sort. I did a commit before switching branches.

> It's also highly likely that what's missing is stuff you thought you
> imported initially, but did not actually import due to the confusion with
> it already being a git working directory.
>

As I said the test directories did not have any .git directories in them. If they had git mv would not have worked.