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Re: tracking two git branches at once


From: Johannes Schindelin
Subject: Re: tracking two git branches at once
Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2007 14:38:20 +0100 (CET)

Hi,

On Fri, 2 Mar 2007, Graham Percival wrote:

> Most of the time I track master.  I have the documentation built, so 
> whenever I make a change it only takes a few minutes to compile the 
> changed the files.
> 
> Occasionally I want to make a one-line change to web/master.  If I just 
> do "git checkout web/master", then I get a weird mixture of master and 
> web/master (because git doesn't remove my Documentation/ because I have 
> compiled files in there).  I can avoid this weird mixture by deleting 
> all the files before checking out the new branch, but then when I go 
> back to master, it takes me an hour to compile all the docs.  As a 
> result, I tend to wait for a week or two before making changes to 
> web/master.
> 
> Can I have a pair of directories like
> lily-main/master
> lily-main/web
> 
> which track different branches of git?  (ie without downloading all 
> changes twice)

Hm. That's certainly a _bit_ cumbersome with Git. However, it is possible. 
If you bear with me for a few minutes, you can make yourself a fine script 
and it will be easy for you (after writing that script).

The idea I have in mind is to use a local clone. Git makes this very easy, 
and even efficient: if you clone with "git clone -l -s -n . my-web", you 
will have a clone (of the repository you are currently working in) in 
my-web/.

The option "-l" says that this is a local clone, which makes it fast. The 
option "-s" tells Git to reuse the object database, so it makes it 
inexpensive in terms of disk space. And "-n" says that Git should not 
checkout a branch (otherwise it would checkout the master branch of the 
source repository, which is your current one).

So, after creating this clone, you have to cd into my-web/ and say "git 
checkout web/master".

You might want to copy the "remote" information (the shortcuts for fetch 
and push) from the "master" repository to the "my-web" repository. I'd 
just copy & paste the relevant parts from master/.git/config to 
my-web/.git/config.

The real problem is that you should always fetch from your first 
repository, and then fetch from _that_ into my-web/. You _can_ fetch from 
savannah into my-web/ directly, and it works just as expected, _except_ 
that the objects are now stored in my-web/.git/. The next time you fetch 
from savannah into your "master" repository, you will have the objects 
_twice_.

In practice, however, this might not be the problem I made it sound like.

BTW your use case is a perfect demonstration that the "distributed" in 
distributed SCMs not only benefits a _group_ of developers, but already a 
single one!

Ciao,
Dscho





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