If I understand correctly [*1*] what you did during this "Pull" was to get the data from your home bare repo to your work machine for git to decode, and then for git to feed the results back to your home working repo, so taking a full ssh round trip (ssh encoded both ways).
That is, you maybe thought that the ssh excuted git on your home machine rather than simply giving you file access. [*1*] http://lifehacker.com/205090/geek-to-live--set-up-a-personal-home-ssh-server "Unlike a VNC server, SSH (alone) doesn't let you drive your computer remotely" I could well be wrong as I only use ssh for my github connection.... I was just trying to learn the lessons. I've split your original into chunks below so I could pick out nuances. Philip ----- Original Message ----- From: John McKown To: git-users@googlegroups.com Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2012 3:10 PM Subject: [git-users] interesting? observation about "git mv" propagation This may not be a shock to most, but it was a real surprise to me. I have two machines. One at work. One at home. I am using git to keep a project in sync between the two. I have a working directory on both machines. On my home machine, I have a separate "repository" which is on my home machine. So I do the changes in the "working directory" (either at work or at home) and "git push" and "git pull" to/from the repository to maintain synchronization. It works well. I decided that I wanted to do some renames on my work machine. I had 55 text files which I decided I should have a ".txt" suffix on. So I did a "git mv" on each, adding the ".txt" to the end of the file name. I did a "git commit" after each "git mv" detailing the renaming, similar to:"rename x to x.txt". I then did a "git push" to my repository (which did an SSH push to my home machine). Worked fairly fast, although the "git commit" was a bit slow. Anyway, I then did an "ssh" onto my home machine. Did a "cd" to the working directory and did a "git pull". Oh my word. It seemed to take forever. I did a second ssh to get another terminal session going. I guess that I should have known, but what actually happened was that the "git pull" deleted all the old versions of the files from my working directory, then expanded the compressed versions back with the new name. I guess I was expecting a simple rename. Not a delete / restore. OK, people "in the know" may have expected this. But it was a complete shock to me. And I thought it might be of interest to other newbies. --