Put part of working tree on another file-system.

Hello,

I've a desire to put a sub-tree of my working tree into another file-system. With CVS I've used symlink to achieve this. It works fine with CVS as it doesn't care about directories and symlinks at all. I had little hope it will work with GIT, but I've performed a test anyway. To my surprise it almost worked, so I have a hope that maybe it's not that difficult to support this. What do you think? Or maybe there is a different way to achieve the goal with GIT?

The test has been performed in a clone of the git tree (my comments are prefixed by "osv>"):

$ git status # On branch master nothing to commit (working directory clean) $ mv gitweb ../ && ln -s ../gitweb . $ git status # On branch master # Untracked files: # (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed) # # gitweb nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

osv> here GIT is slightly confused by the change of a directory to a osv> symlink to a directory.

$ echo hehe >> gitweb/INSTALL $ git status # On branch master # Changed but not updated: # (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed) # # modified: gitweb/INSTALL # # Untracked files: # (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed) # # gitweb no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

osv> here confusion is more obvious as GIT reports modified file in an osv> untracked directory.

$ git commit -a

Created commit 7470207: The commit
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
$ git status
# On branch master
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       gitweb
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

osv> surprisingly nothing very bad happened, -- GIT has commited the
osv> modified file just fine, and left the symlink unchanged.
 
$ git reset --hard HEAD^
HEAD is now at 7a4a2e1... Set OLD_ICONV on Cygwin.
[osv@fulcrum git]$ git status
# On branch master
# Changed but not updated:
#   (use "git add/rm <file>..." to update what will be committed)
#
#       deleted:    gitweb/README
#       deleted:    gitweb/git-favicon.png
#       deleted:    gitweb/git-logo.png
#       deleted:    gitweb/gitweb.css
#       deleted:    gitweb/gitweb.perl
#       deleted:    gitweb/test/Märchen
#       deleted:    gitweb/test/file with spaces
#       deleted:    gitweb/test/file+plus+sign
#
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

osv> Ooops, -- now things begin to be more seriously broken. The result osv> is that GIT removed the symlink, created gitweb directory, and put osv> only INSTALL file into it. The directory the symlink was pointing osv> to has the rest of files but INSTALL.

$ git reset --hard HEAD HEAD is now at 7a4a2e1... Set OLD_ICONV on Cygwin. $ git status # On branch master nothing to commit (working directory clean)

osv> This is now as expected, -- GIT just re-populated the gitweb osv> directory as there is no symlink anymore.

Sergei Organov wrote:

I needed to do this in Cygwin, and saw the same behaviour. I worked around it by using cygwin's "mount" command to "mount" the other directory in Cygwin's namespace. With this done, cygwin does not detect a symlink (since there is none), and works as expected.

With sufficient permissions, you can probably achieve the same effect with bind mounts perhaps (assuming Linux, of course).

Rogan

Rogan Dawes <lists@dawes.za.net> writes:

Thanks for the idea, -- it seems to work.

[In fact it is Linux, and those "another file-system" is FAT32 partition, so that, when rebooting to Windoze, this directory could be accessed from there. I can't put all the working tree there as there are parts of the tree that depend on file system being case-sensitive.]