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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

I haven't tried it, but I think it's fine if only one person has write access to any given clone. You can pull back and forth between clones freely. It's if you have two Git clients trying to write to the same repo that you'll have problems.

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I've put private working copies on NFS and CIFS. NFS worked pretty well (which probably speaks as much to the admins as the tech). Samba mounts on the other hand had all sorts of problems with time stamps that confused not only git, but the build system as well.

Shared write access to the same git repo directory can be done sanely, but you have to get a number of things right (same group for all users, everything group writable, sticky bit on directories, set config core.sharedRepository=group): https://stackoverflow.com/a/29646155

Yes, when you're not on NFS. Maybe it works on NFS but I wouldn't bet my project on it. Locking reliably on NFS is easy to get wrong, and it's a comparatively little-tested scenario now compared to 30 years ago. (You'll notice that the question doesn't even mention the possibility of NFS.) Fortunately at least with Git it's easy to have lots of backups.

For what it's worth they do call it out in the manual as a common thing to do: https://git-scm.com/book/ms/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protoco...

Granted I've never tried it so take it with a grain of salt.

That makes me a little less suspicious, and of course the Git developers are well aware of things like concurrency problems and filesystem limitations. But I'd still regard it as an area to be wary of. But only if two clients might be writing to the same repo concurrently.

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