Syncing a git working tree with Dropbox?

I've heard of people keeping a bare repo in their Dropbox folder
(https://www.dropbox.com/) and pushing to and pulling from it, letting
Dropbox sync the bare repo between their machines. In other words using
Dropbox as a form of hosting for a private git repo. What I want to do
is sort of the other way around.

I keep on getting into the following mess: I have some changes in my
working tree on machine A, I stop working on machine A and don't commit
and push the changes (to my remote, 'central' bare repo) either because
they're not ready yet, or I forget to commit or push. Later on I arrive
at machine B which has its own clone of the same repo, but because I
didn't commit and push the changes on machine A I don't have access to
them on machine B and I can't continue working on them. The two machines
are physically located far away from each other and they're not
accessible over the internet. Argh!

Dropbox is a proprietary sync service that gets around this problem
because it automatically syncs your files whenever you save them. But I
still want to keep my project in a git repo. I'm assuming that keeping
the actual .git folder in a Dropbox folder, so that when git makes
changes inside the .git folder Drobox syncs them, would be a bad idea.
It seems like taking two different synchronisation systems and mashing
them into each other. But what about just the working tree?

My idea is that I keep my .git folder safely outside of my Dropbox
folder, but my git repository has a detached working tree that is
located in the Dropbox folder. On machine B it would be the same setup.
So the two machines each have their own clone of the git repo and these
are synchronised by git push and git pull with a 'central' remote repo.
But the two clones share the same working tree, or more accurately their
working trees are synced by Dropbox.

The working tree is just files, I don't see how it's different from
Dropbox syncing any other files. Dropbox and git ought not to collide in
any way. So this should work fine shouldn't it?

This way I don't need to commit and push my changes until they're
ready/I remember to, but whenever I move from machine A to machine B my
uncommitted changes will still be available to me because Dropbox has
synced my working tree automatically.

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 7:57 AM, chombee [off-list ref] wrote:

My idea is that I keep my .git folder safely outside of my Dropbox
folder, but my git repository has a detached working tree that is
located in the Dropbox folder. On machine B it would be the same setup.
So the two machines each have their own clone of the git repo and these
are synchronised by git push and git pull with a 'central' remote repo.
But the two clones share the same working tree, or more accurately their
working trees are synced by Dropbox.

The working tree is just files, I don't see how it's different from
Dropbox syncing any other files. Dropbox and git ought not to collide in
any way. So this should work fine shouldn't it?

Your changes in git (like new commits) won't be synced.

-- 
Cheers,
Ray Chuan

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 9:39 PM, Tay Ray Chuan [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 7:57 AM, chombee [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

My idea is that I keep my .git folder safely outside of my Dropbox
folder, but my git repository has a detached working tree that is
located in the Dropbox folder. On machine B it would be the same setup.
So the two machines each have their own clone of the git repo and these
are synchronised by git push and git pull with a 'central' remote repo.
But the two clones share the same working tree, or more accurately their
working trees are synced by Dropbox.

The working tree is just files, I don't see how it's different from
Dropbox syncing any other files. Dropbox and git ought not to collide in
any way. So this should work fine shouldn't it?

Your changes in git (like new commits) won't be synced.

You have to sync your .git directory. For example, using your setup,
if you switch branches on Machine A, your working directory will
change on Machine B, but Machine B will still think it's on the
previous branch. This scenario would cause a lot of problems for Git.

There shouldn't be any problems with placing your entire repository
(working tree and .git directory) inside Dropbox as long as you only
use one computer at a time.

-Geoffrey Lee