clone branching?

Trans· Aug 11, 2008, 18:24 UTC · lore

Hi,

I'm new to this list and evaluating whether to use Git. On the whole I really like Git, however, I'm not sure l like the way it handles branching.

Can Git be effectively used if clone is used for branching, rather then using the internal branch naming?

Thanks, T.

Miklos Vajna· Aug 11, 2008, 19:17 UTC · re: Trans · lore

Re: clone branching?

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 02:24:23PM -0400, Trans <transfire@gmail.com> wrote:

> Can Git be effectively used if clone is used for branching, rather
> then using the internal branch naming?

See git clone -l.

You can also use git clone -s (but it may be dangerous, more info in the manpage) and git-new-workdir (but that's only in contrib, you may have issues with it).

Karl Hasselström· Aug 11, 2008, 20:39 UTC · re: Trans · lore

Re: clone branching?

On 2008-08-11 14:24:23 -0400, Trans wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> I'm new to this list and evaluating whether to use Git. On the whole
> I really like Git, however, I'm not sure l like the way it handles
> branching.
>
> Can Git be effectively used if clone is used for branching, rather
> then using the internal branch naming?

Yes, definitely.

git supports multiple branches per repository/working copy, but doesn't force you to have more than one. And it's very easy to pull changes from one repo to another.

-- 
Karl Hasselström, kha@treskal.com
      www.treskal.com/kalle

Karl Hasselström· Aug 12, 2008, 07:34 UTC · lore

Re: clone branching?

On 2008-08-11 16:24:57 -0400, Trans wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 4:39 PM, Karl Hasselström <kha@treskal.com>
> wrote:
>
> > git supports multiple branches per repository/working copy, but
> > doesn't force you to have more than one. And it's very easy to
> > pull changes from one repo to another.
>
> In retrospect, It's more the tags I need rather then branches, but
> just the same... So if I have a repository like:
>
>   myapp/
>     1.0.0/
>     1.0.1/
>     1.1.0/
>     current/
>
> This would be okay? No other "giter" is going to look at this and
> think "what the hell?"

That would be OK. But "myapp" wouldn't be a repository -- it'd be a directory that contains four repositories. Each of those repositories would have a specific branch checked out, but they'd probably all contain the full set of tags and branches.

> Hmm... actually I don't see how this can work. If .get is under
> current/ than no one will be able to see the tags on my shared repo,
> but if it is under myapp/ then I'd be branching and tagging my tags
> --that's doesn't make any sense. I'm confused.

All your repositories have a .git directory. That's what makes them git reppositories.

I think what you need to do to get un-confused is to learn about how git stores history. Specifically, that

  1. the history consists of a DAG of commits, and

  2. that branches and tags are just named pointers to commits.

http://eagain.net/articles/git-for-computer-scientists/ is a short and sweet introduction.

-- 
Karl Hasselström, kha@treskal.com
      www.treskal.com/kalle