Hi all, I know that the manpage explicitly states that it's not possible to clones into an existing, non-empty directory, but I wanted to see if anyone is aware of a workaround or if I can convince people that is it of use in specific circumstances. Some of you will be keeping their RC files in git repo(s) which means you are basically left with two options: 1) Use soft-/hardlinks 2) Change your working tree I went for option two which looks like: richih@roadwarrior ~/.config/vcsh/repo.d/mr.git % ls -a . branches config FETCH_HEAD hooks info objects packed-refs .. COMMIT_EDITMSG description HEAD index logs ORIG_HEAD refs richih@roadwarrior ~/.config/vcsh/repo.d/mr.git % cat config [core] repositoryformatversion = 0 filemode = true bare = false logallrefupdates = true worktree = /home/richih/ [remote "origin"] fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* url = <remote> [branch "master"] remote = origin merge = refs/heads/master richih@roadwarrior ~/.config/vcsh/repo.d/mr.git % This works just fine as long as you're using git --work-tree=$HOME \ --git-dir=$HOME/.config/vcsh/repo.d/mr.git \ pull or similar on an existing, manually mangled repo. The only real problem left is that I can't clone initially as $HOME is obviously non-empty, resulting in git --work-tree=$HOME \ --git-dir=$HOME/.config/vcsh/repo.d/mr.git \ clone <remote> .config/vcsh/repo.d/mr.git fatal: working tree '/home/richih' already exists. This means I am down to cloning, creating the directories I need, moving .git and the actual files around, making git aware that tracked files were not deleted, just moved, and then finally being able to use my repo. Obviously, this would imply some sort of conflict handling during cloning. Anyway, I would _really_ love to have a way to avoid all this manual work and just clone into $HOME, telling git that it's OK and I know what I am doing. Thanks, Richard PS: In case you are interested in keeping your RC files (and the rest of your life) in git, there's a vcs-home mailing list and #vcs-home on irc.oftc.net. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html