Re: How do I stop git enumerating my working directory

Glenn Griffin wrote:

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Paul Gardiner [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Hi,

I'm a recent convert to git. I've been swapping over my projects
from cvs to git. The latest candidate for conversion is the
config files for my Linux server. I've been using cvs to record
all the config changes, and - mostly-automatically - to setup
new servers. Git will do a far better job, I think, but
I think I'm going to run into a problem: the root directory
of the server will be the working directory. Only relatively
few files will be under version control. How do I stop git
enumerating the whole drive whenever I do things like git-diff?

I'm doing a similar thing in my home directory where the vast majority of files
are not being tracked, but only a select few are.  I've found that git
automatically handles this case much better than other SCM's like subversion
because of it's concept of the index.  Most of git's commands wont enumerate
your directory they will first read the index to see what files it's interested
in, and then do an lstat on those files to see which if any have changed.
git-diff in particular should do this to my knowledge.  git-status is one of
the few commands that will actually enumerate your directory to tell you which
files are untracked, so long as you use status with care you will probably find
you don't need to do anything special or even setup
a .gitignore.

Like I said, that's my experience your's may vary.

Brilliant! I've now tried it and it does just as you say. I don't
need git-status so it's just fine. Thanks for the advice.

P.