Re: Can we get a git clone flag to override the "required empty directory" behaviour?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 24, 2015, 21:41 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq6159kzcn.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <CACjsLYAPqCujmR0wQM-CD=qrPJz1zrC11Pe=C07DUBdEsG2r7A@mail.gmail.com>

Mike Kasprzak <mike@sykhronics.com> writes:

> What I would like to do is git clone inside that directory. Alas, git
> will not let you clone in any directory containing a file.

In the ideal world, I think both of these two commands:

    $ git clone $URL somewhere
    $ cd somewhere && git clone $URL .

should behave just like:

    - if somewhere/.git exists, barf and fail
    - otherwise, do the "git init && git add remote && git fetch"
      followed by "git checkout" dance.

without any additional option. The final "checkout" step should fail if the "untracked files" you have in the existing directory interfere with it.

It used to be that you always had to create a "new" directory, not even an empty directory was allowed. Recently we took a small step in that direction.

That hasn't happened, and will not happen unless somebody works on it. The thing is that it would not just be the matter of adding a command line flag. There are tons of things "git clone" can do differently from "git fetch" and using much simpler and performant logic because it assumes that the directory it is cloning into is an empty one.