Re: Storing state in $GIT_DIR

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Aug 26, 2005, 03:54 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0508252051400.3317@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <46a038f905082518306e9d7d2a@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, 26 Aug 2005, Martin Langhoff wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> OTOH, storing the metadata in a branch will allow us to run the import
> in alternating repositories. But as Junio points out, unless I can
> guarantee that the metadata and the tree are in sync, I cannot
> trivially resume the import cycle from a new repo.

But you can.

Remember: the metadata is the pointers to the original git conversion, and 
objects are immutable.

In other words, if you just have a "last commit" pointer in your meta-data, then git is _by_definition_ in sync. There's never anything to get out of sync, because objects aren't going to change.

So you can think of your meta-data as a strange kind of head ref. Or rather, a _collection_ of these strange refs.

And it doesn't matter if somebody ends up committing on top of an arch import. The metadata by definition doesn't know about it, so the "import" head doesn't move anywhere (if you do git and arch work in parallell, you can then merge the two heads with git, of course).

			Linus