Re: Storing state in $GIT_DIR

On Fri, 26 Aug 2005, Martin Langhoff wrote:

OTOH, storing the metadata in a branch will allow us to run the import
in alternating repositories. But as Junio points out, unless I can
guarantee that the metadata and the tree are in sync, I cannot
trivially resume the import cycle from a new repo.

But you can.

Remember: the metadata is the pointers to the original git conversion, and 
objects are immutable.

In other words, if you just have a "last commit" pointer in your 
meta-data, then git is _by_definition_ in sync. There's never anything to 
get out of sync, because objects aren't going to change.

So you can think of your meta-data as a strange kind of head ref. Or 
rather, a _collection_ of these strange refs.

And it doesn't matter if somebody ends up committing on top of an arch 
import. The metadata by definition doesn't know about it, so the "import" 
head doesn't move anywhere (if you do git and arch work in parallell, you 
can then merge the two heads with git, of course).

			Linus