Hi Raphael, On Friday 02 September 2011, Raphael Manfredi wrote: > How can I work with multiple sandboxes tied to the same GIT database? > > I don't want to clone multiple copies of git everywhere here but I > want to have several trees (between 5 and 10) with various distinct > changed made to each of them that I can test independently.
There are different answers to that question. The short one is probably this: Make the second (and third etc.) clone not from the shared repository over the network, but directly from your first clone through the local filesystem. Git will then create all its immutable object files as hard links. You may notice by the speed of the operation that the contents of the object files are never physically copied. But even in the rare cases when hard links are not possible (because you want the clones to reside on different machines or on different partitions within the same machine), there is nothing inherently bad in keeping several full clones, because they are not that large. In the case of gtk-gnutella, the .git folder that contains the repository with all its history is only about the same size as the current checkout. So even when you have _all_ your clones on different machines, making full clones everywhere only about doubles the disk space needed. That said, keeping checkouts of different development branches in different folders is a practice that is much less useful with Git than with SVN, because it is (in many cases) essentially a work-around for a problem that doesn't exist in Git. With SVN, you often keep one checkout folder for every branch you're working on, because switching between branches is otherwise a tedious server operation. You don't do that with Git. Most people have only _one_ clone, even when they are working on ten different branches. That's because switching between branches goes within the blink of an eye. Most of the time, it is done before you can release the "enter" key after typing the "git checkout" command. You create a new local branch for every little feature you develop, and you change between these branches back and forth all the time. If you say that you want to have 15 different instances of gtk-gnutella _running_ simultaneously, that doesn't necessarily mean that you want to _compile_ them all at the same time, do you? If not, you don't need 15 instances of source code, because you only need it while compiling or editing, not while running. And you can only _edit_ one copy at a time anyway. That probably means that you can do it "the Git way" and only keep one single clone. Only if you still think that you _really_ need multiple clones, create them locally within the same filesystem as indicated in the first paragraph. Bye, Hauke ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free "Love Thy Logs" t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev _______________________________________________ gtk-gnutella-devel mailing list gtk-gnutella-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gtk-gnutella-devel
