Re: Committing crimes with NTFS-3G

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Aug 30, 2024, 00:47 UTC
Message-ID: <ZtEWvQOwLPgjIFks@tapette.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <7d1dad03-703c-47ae-a039-c15aa765fd0b@gaijin.team>

On 2024-08-29 at 20:43:40, Roman Sandu wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Good day!
> 
> I have a decently sized (80K files) monorepo on an NTFS drive that I have
> been working with for a while under Windows via git-for-windows. Recently, I
> had to (temporarily) switch to Ubuntu (24.04) via dual-boot for irrelevant
> reasons, and I decided that simply mounting my NTFS drive and using the
> monorepo from Ubuntu is a great idea, actually, as NTFS-3G allow for
> seamless interop with NTFS via UserMapping. And so that is exactly what I
> did and It Just Works!

In general, I would not recommend this. NTFS doesn't support Unix permissions, so I'd expect a lot of things to be broken. A lot of people like using NTFS to share data across Windows and Linux, but UDF is a much better choice and I'm not surprised that NTFS isn't working the way you'd expect.

Also, when you share a repository across systems, you should expect the index to be fully refreshed each time you change the OS, reading every file in the repository[0].

> So, what do I do about this? It honestly looks like a git bug to me, maybe
> it silently fails to update the index with new timestamps because it was
> initially created on Windows? But I have no clue how to narrow this issue
> down further, so any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated!

Can you pick some file in your repository and run `stat` on it, before and after running `git status`, and include the output?

For example:

  stat http.c | tee /tmp/before
  git status
  stat http.c | tee /tmp/after
  sha256sum /tmp/before /tmp/after

My guess is that NTFS-3G is not emulating something properly and it's differing at some point.

[0] https://git-scm.com/docs/gitfaq#sync-working-tree

-- 
brian m. carlson (they/them or he/him)
Toronto, Ontario, CA