Hi,
Antonio Ospite wrote:
> vcsh[1] uses bare git repositories and detached work-trees to manage
> *distinct* sets of configuration files directly into $HOME.
Cool! I like the tooling you're creating for this, though keep in mind
that Git has some weaknesses as a tool for deployment.
In particular, keep in mind that when git updates a file, there is a
period of time while it is missing from the filesystem, which can be
problematic for dotfiles.
[...]
> However when multiple repositories take turns using the same directory
> as their work-tree, and more than one of them want to use submodules,
> there could still be conflicts about the '.gitmodules' file because git
> hardcodes this path.
>
> For comparison, in case of '.gitignore' a similar conflict might arise,
> but git has alternative ways to specify exclude files, so vcsh solves
> this by setting core.excludesFile for each repository and track ignored
> files somewhere else (in ~/.gitignore.d/$VCSH_REPO_NAME).
For reference:
core.excludesFile
Specifies the pathname to the file that contains
patterns to describe paths that are not meant to be
tracked, in addition to .gitignore (per-directory) and
.git/info/exclude. Defaults to
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is
either not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/ignore is
used instead. See gitignore(5).
Using this as a substitute for <worktree>/.gitignore is a bit of a
hack. It happens to work, though, so reading on. :)
[...]
> So this series proposes a mechanism to set an alternative path for the
> submodules configuration file (from now on "gitmodules file").
I am nervous about this. I wonder if there is another way to
accomplish the goal.
One possibility would be to handle the case where .gitmodules is
excluded by a sparse checkout specification and use .gitmodules from
the index in that case. Would that work for you?
Thanks,
Jonathan
