Re: [PATCH] Add platform-independent .git "symlink"

Hi,

BTW just to tell you why I am so excited with your patch: I have a patch to git-branch in my tree, which implements the git-new-workdir functionality (it's a patch to git-branch, not git-checkout, mainly because git-checkout is no builtin yet).

Now, git-new-workdir works by having symlinks _in_ .git/, but not for everything. .git/HEAD is specific to the workdir, of course.

But your patch made me realise that this is the wrong way to go about it. Sure, you do not need to change core git, and can use a script to make the new working directory. But there is no lock preventing the same ref being checked out twice.

Howver, having .git a file pointing to another git directory allows you to have locks there. And they can be actually pretty sensible locks, like

	.git/HEAD.<mangled-path>

actually containing the symbolic ref describing which branch we're on in that working directory. Likewise, .git/index.<mangled-path> needs to hold the current index.

Of course, for this to work, you need to use different HEADs and indexes only if .git was a file originally.

BTW <mangled-path> could be a hash of the path, and for convenience, we could store the path in .git/workdir.<mangled-path>.

Food for thought.

Ciao, Dscho