Re: Bug Report: git add

Jakub Narebski [off-list ref] writes:

Currently I have TODO file in gitweb/ subdirectory, which is stored in
gitweb/.git repository.  Still it doesn't prevent me from "git add"-ing
e.g. 'gitweb/gitweb.perl' to git repository itself.

I would have to say that it is somewhat a sensible thing to want to do
from an individual contributor's point of view to keep track of personal
notes on a subpart of a project in a separate repository.

It however directly contradicts with the approach I suggested earlier,
which resulted in Peff's patch

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/170937/focus=171040 

and will be broken, I think.

We could skip the check for a directory D where there already is a path
D/P (where P has one or more path components, e.g. "file", "subdir/file")
tracked and check only if D/.git is a git directory when adding path in D
if there is no other D/P is tracked (and perhaps require --force), if we
really wanted to keep supporting what you are doing.  But I do not think
it is worth doing, considering the possibility that such a loophole would
lead to even more confusing behaviour to new users.

If there is an equally easy way of keeping track of personal notes in a
subpart of a larger project like you do, without having an unrelated .git/
directory in a worktree that is controlled by a project and mixing files
in a single directory in such a way that some belong to the main project
while others belong to the unrelated "personal notes" project, I would
rather see us recommend such an approach, and declare that your use case
is forbidden, as it would give us a far easier to explain rule: "files in
one directory can be controlled only by one .git/ directory".

Besides, if the subpart of the project you are interested in and want to
have personal notes about were at the top-level of the project, you
wouldn't be using the same workflow as you currently do, as you cannot
obviously have two .git/ at the same level.