Re: mtimes of working files

From: Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk>
Date: Jul 14, 2007, 13:09 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0707141402230.3133@beast.quantumfyre.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <1184370414.2785.79.camel@shinybook.infradead.org>

On Sat, 14 Jul 2007, David Woodhouse wrote:

Show 27 quoted lines

> On Fri, 2007-07-13 at 16:18 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> Why would anybody force you to do that?
>>
>> The "switch between branchs in the same repo" is really convenient.
>> But nobody *forces* you to do it.
>
> This is true. I already mirror a bunch of CVS and SVN repositories into
> git so that I can use them without too much pain¹, and I can do the same
> for git trees which use branches too; mirroring them into a bunch of
> separate trees for easy access.
>
> On the occasions I actually try to _use_ branches, I find it very
> suboptimal. Perhaps it's just because I'm stupid. I'm sure that's why I
> ended up committing changes to the wrong branch. But having to rebuild
> (even with ccache) after changing branches is a PITA. Just changing
> branches at all is a PITA if you have uncommitted changes (which I
> usually do because I've usually tested _some_ random patch in a build
> tree for the hardware which is closest to hand). Pulling a whole bunch
> of unwanted changes on the 'development' branch while on GPRS, when all
> I really needed was a single commit from the 'stable' branch also didn't
> amuse me, although I'm sure if I had the time to play with it I'd have
> been able to avoid that.
>
> I can, and do, mirror stuff from all kinds of suboptimal version control
> systems into single-branch git trees. And I include multi-branched git
> trees in my definition of 'suboptimal'. My ability to do that doesn't
> really help the newbies who are expected with branches, though.

You can flatten a multi-branched git repo without mirroring into multiple single-branch repos - The ability to pull out branches into separate trees from a single repository was what the git-new-workdir script in contrib was written for.

While I find branches quite a natural concept having used the for the past few years in Subversion and CVS before that (and after that branches in git are a delight to use), I still like to have access to all of the branches that I am working on as separate trees.

git-new-workdir allowed me to do that by scripting an approach described by Junio. Though maybe it has been superseeded by some built-in feature? I haven't been following things that closely recently, and ISTR that there was talk of a feature that would make the script obsolete.

-- 
Julian

  ---
You're at Witt's End.