GIT & Symbolic Links

Hi Group,

I'm consider myself as a new baby when it come to GiT. But I have just migrate my users from SVN to GIT and I have some questions in mind I want to share with you.

Is it possible to do the following:

Say I have a really big GiT repo (something around 1GB) name DEV. In the SVN days, each of my developers (100 Users) had to clone a local copy of the DEV Repo in his home folder, so total of 100GB was used in my shared storage (NFS Drive) where something around 85% was actually just a copy of the same files.

When I used the De-Duplication function (Under ZFS File System) I could easy see how the volume is shrinking, but I more inserting in different kind of solution, now when it comes to GIT.

So for the example let's consider that user A clone the DEV GIT Repo into his/her home folder (/home/A/DEV) User B want to clone the same Repo. But now, I don't want user B to clone the all tree and files, but instead to have a symbolic links to the /home/A/DEV folder. All files and directories in the /home/B/DEV will be a links to the /home/A/DEV.

Once user B actually want to change a file, ?somehow? the git brake the link, and have a local copy of that specific file. When the file is push back the link become back.

While trying to get some feedback in the IRC roon, some users point me to git-annex and unionfs. Both project seems to be cool, git-annex really have nice options, but I don't see how this going to help me.

Regarding unionfs - well I'm still not sure.

Maybe someone can help here...

Thanks