From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2025 22:36:06 GMT
Subject: Re: What is the reason behind not hiding git worktrees from git?
Message-ID: <8cc4ca72-c87a-acc1-e200-53be14d649f8@gmx.de>
In-Reply-To: <CAPig+cQgZijWi8VV1_QScKPhm9cqhQVvow4N-VH00R4oO1m2xA@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Eric,

On Wed, 1 Oct 2025, Eric Sunshine wrote:

> [...] There are plenty of people who already locate worktrees as
> subdirectories of the main worktree[*] and do so without problem, and
> for whom it is a preferred workflow, so I don't see why we would want to
> penalize them by warning against doing so, especially since there is no
> technical reason to avoid the practice (i.e. Git handles it just fine).
> [...]
>
> FOOTNOTES
> 
> [*]: There have been numerous emails on the list showing that placing
> worktrees as subdirectories of the main worktree is common enough
> practice. And, as far as "experienced users" are concerned (not just
> novices picking up the practice from blogs or tutorials), I recall an
> email discussion in which Dscho has said that he locates worktrees as
> subdirectories of the main worktree, as well. I, too, have done so on
> occasion.

And indeed I do, and continue to do so because the counter arguments in
that email discussion looked quite weak to me.

In the one instance where I heeded that well-meant advice to create
worktrees outside of my main worktree, I lost work when I had cleaned up
that main worktree after verifying with `git status` that there was no
unfinished business to take care of before deleting the repository.
Because that secondary worktree (which did contain unfinished business,
including a carefully crafted series of commits) was now obviously no
longer a worktree but only a tree without a working `.git`.

Ciao,
Johannes