Re: How to simulate a real checkout to test a new smudge filter?

john smith <wempwer@gmail.com> writes:

If the new branch you are going to and your current branch record different contents for a path, that path will have to be checked out to the working tree, and smudge will be involved in the process to turn the "clean" contents stored in a Git object needs to be smudged for use in the outside world. If both branches have the same contents, then there is no need to overwrite the path in the working tree with the same thing, so it is not touched.

The clean and smudge operations should look _only_ at the contents they are filtering, and nothing else, and the clean/smudge filtering mechanism is designed to support that use case. It is not designed to do things like embedding the name of the branch that is being checked out into the result.