Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] Allow adding .git files and directories

From: Lukas Straub <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2020 14:39:41 +0200

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 09:01:25 -0400
Jeff King <[email-masked]> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 20, 2020 at 01:34:45PM +0200, Lukas Straub wrote:
> 
> > Yes, there are many workarounds and they work well in the CI usecase. However,
> > for the arbitrary files usecase there is no good workaround. I currently use
> > a script which iterates over the tree and renames .git -> dotgit before running
> > any git command and back again afterwards, but it is slow and brittle. I toyed
> > with the idea of writing a FUSE filesystem to do the renaming, but it is
> > needlessly complex and hurts performance.
> > 
> > Really, this problem should be solved in git itself.  
> 
> It is unclear to me why need to hold many sub-repositories within the
> parent one, nor what Git operations you expect to perform over them. And
> what disadvantages your script solution has.
> 
> Perhaps you can give a more concrete use-case (but before you spend a
> lot of time doing so, I'll warn you that I find it pretty unlikely that
> it will cross the bar necessary to counter the downsides we've discussed
> so far).
> 
> -Peff

I store all my files in several git(-annex) repositories. By "files" I mean
anything you might find in your home directory across your devices, anything
on usb thumbdrives, sd cards and maybe your home NAS. And anything you would
usually use google photos, iCloud, dropbox, etc. for.
Concrete examples:
I store the home directories (containing git repos) of two retired machines
in such a repository. I don't store the homes in a archive file as I want to
use git-annex's ability to only have the contents of files I need on my
laptop.
I store my development directory containing several(130) git/svn/unversioned
projects in another repo. This allows me to version and sync everything
(including WIPs) across my machines. I tried alternative workflows and they
didn't work out.

In both cases, the script introduces a delay of ~10 seconds to every git
command I run in the outer repository and I have to remember to use the script
on these repos.
Moreover, I can't use the git-annex assistant, which watches the repo and
automatically commits and syncs file changes.
In my opinion, I want to be able to set the allow-dotgit config and it'll
just work without the delay and without having to remember the script.

The downsides we discussed don't apply in this usecase. These are mostly
personal files, so I wont upload them to any hosting site (not even private
ones). There is no security impact as I only sync with trusted devices.

Regards,
Lukas Straub