Re: Cloning empty repositories, was Re: What is the idea for bare repositories?

David Kastrup wrote:

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

But cloning void to start the same project by multiple people
and pushing their initial commits as roots to start a project
indicates the lack of developer communication (besides, it just
feels like a bad style, a hangover from centralized SCM
mentality, but that is fine).

I do not like the approach of policy by force.  It assumes that the
developers know better than the users what the users are going to do
with git.

Junio just said "but that is fine", so afaiu he's not against allowing
it per se. It's just that him and the other frequent contributors don't
have this particular problem, so if *they* fix it it will
a) Not be done with enthusiasm, and it would indeed drain enthusiasm and
   happiness from the project.
b) Perhaps not be done the way those who want this feature would like it.
c) Take another scarce resource (time) from other, more pressing issues
   which may or may not affect your workflow too.

Junio also suggested what's likely to be needed for this to work "properly",
ie, an extension to the git protocol to let it transfer symref content.

Since empty repositories have HEAD pointing to refs/heads/master by default,
you might get away with a simpler implementation.

For example, I use git for tracking and versioning installations and
updaters of complex programs.  They are basically built into a directory
tree, and this tree is checked into a bare repository in a branch
corresponding to a particular customer.  The trees are _target_ trees
created completely by something akin to make install.  So every checkin
is from scratch.  The checkins for a particular customer happen in one
branch so that it is easy to generate a diff and from that an updater
(the diff gets converted into a batch file removing old files and a zip
file unpacking new files over the old ones).

There simply is no common reference/starting point for the disparate
branches.  I have some "README" in master, but that is an utterly stupid
and unnatural starting point.

One might argue that one should use one repository per customer and just
share the objects (many of which are similar).  But that disallows
making diffs between the trees of different customers.  Since the
purpose of git here is just to track history and not do any sort of
merging or rebasing, there are no interesting ancestry connections
between branches.

Am I stupid for using git for this sort of thing?  I believe not.  And
yet git developers choose to call me stupid because my work flow does
not lend any sense to a common ancestor commit.

Not stupid, but most likely unusual. Optimizing git for your needs would
imho be a bad idea. It's perfectly fine to use a tool for something else
than what it was intended for, but then you'll have to live with the
fact that it *will* have a few shortcomings and that you'll have to work
around them or fix them yourself.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231