Re: Cloning into an existing directory

From: Brent Goodrick <bgoodr@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 16, 2009, 16:13 UTC
Message-ID: <e38bce640902160813u2771d55co3eb583a0922c09c5@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <c1b8b6670902152331p9bbdb8fo7bf7048039b5301c@mail.gmail.com>

Thanks very much for the advice, Russell.

I did a test by creating the small repo with one file in it, .bashrc and got to the point of the git-fetch. That git-fetch did not complain about the pre-existing .bashrc file. Should it, or is the design of git-fetch to alter the state inside the .git area only and not the working tree? The scan of the user manual and the git-fetch man page does not seem to clarify the effect (none?) that git-fetch has on the working tree.

Now, I see that you said it would complain upon checkout, which it did:

$ git checkout master error: Untracked working tree file '.bashrc' would be overwritten by merge.

Fair enough: git is doing the right thing here and not overwriting the target file since it is not yet git-controlled. Given that I may have many files, my naive way of fixing that is to

1. Move aside each file it complains about
2. Run the git-checkout command again
3. Move each file back to their original names, thus creating a local
edit w.r.t. git
4. Run git diff to see those changes, making additional edits
5. Finally, check in the result

To side-step writing my own wrapper script around git, is there a command-line option to do steps 1 through 3, but not 4 and 5?

Thanks again for your help, bg

On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 11:31 PM, Russell Steicke <russellsteicke@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 30 quoted lines

> On 2/16/09, Brent Goodrick <bgoodr@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>  I would like to manage my startup scripts such as .bashrc and other
>>  setup files relative to my HOME directory using Git. However,
>>  git-clone disallows cloning into the existing "." directory, but only
>>  allows cloning into a subdirectory that does not yet exist.  If my
>>  home directory is /home/brentg and my remote repository is on
>>  remote_machine:~brentg/my_setup.git then git clone in my home
>>  directory on the local machine creates /home/brentg/my_setup with
>>  files such as .bashrc inside it, which is not what I want. I want them
>>  checked out and managed _in_ the current working directory, and not to
>>  mess with other files or directories that already exist that are never
>>  to be managed by git.
>
> cd
> git init
> git remote add origin remote_machine:~brentg/my_setup.git
> git fetch
> git branch master origin/master
> git checkout master
>
> You may have to delete .bashrc and others before git will overwrite
> them on checkout.
>
>
>
> --
> Virus found in this message.
>