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Comment by sampo | Hacker News Reader

> I don't plan to add network functionality to this (even though you totally can), so no clone or push.

You can also git clone from a repository in a different directory in the same computer. And push to.

Exactly, but having branches kind of allow you to not have to create local clones. And I legit use rsync to clone locally git repos. The question is : what is the best ?

You can have multiple worktrees per repo. Usually that's the best solution instead of local clones.

This is what I do for complex projects.

That's interesting, some kind of meta branches.

The git-worktree man page says:

  BUGS

  Multiple checkout in general is still experimental, and
  the support for submodules is incomplete. It is NOT
  recommended to make multiple checkouts of a superproject.

Source: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree

It complicates git with more cruft. A separate clone is more understandable and independent. If you trash something in its .git/ subdirectory, only that repo is affected.

I'd hardly call it "cruft". Git has a lot of features. Not all of them are useful for all combinations of projects, workflows, and people.

In my use case, independence would be an anti-feature. git-worktree fulfills a specific desire that I cannot fulfill with any known alternative. Therefore I use it.

As for actual bugs, I certainly never encountered any. But I also don't use it with repos that contain submodules, as per the warning.

That is so obvious.. yet I've never thought to try this in 10 years of using git.

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