On 2014-03-21 17.13, Matthias Beyer wrote: > Hi, > > I struggled with a really nasty issue today (and yesterday): > > I work on a semester project paper which is written in latex and > therefor version-controlled with git. We compile the document using > pdflatex, we automate the compiling with make. > > pdflatex generates some temporary files, which are required if you > call it the second and third time (it is a top-down compiler, which > needs to be called several times). One of the file extensions is > ".idx", which (kind of) conflicts with file extensions in .git/. > > Unfortunetely, we wrote our `make clean` task recursively. I think you > can imagine what went wrong: The clean-task corrupted the repository, > as it removed .idx files from within .git/. > > I lost work because of this ugly name collision. > > My question now: > > I know, I can fix this by fixing the clean task in my Makefile. But > maybe someone somewhere on this world doesn't know the git internals > as good as me (and, of course, my coworker). Is there _any chance > at all_ that this gets mentioned somewhere, so others don't fall into > this pit? > The idx files are mentioned here: http://www.git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Internals-Packfiles (Otherwise, some random thoughts:) - stay out of the .git directory, whatever you do (I lost some data because my faulty scripts using sed to replace "s/this/that/" and went into the .git directory) - Don't delete "read-only" files (The .idx files are all "r--r--r--") Or in other words, do not use "rf -f" in a script, unless you know exactly what you and the script are doing. - Replace "rm -f" whith "mv /tmp" could be an option - As mentioned before, "git clean" can be an option, I used it once when the "make clean", "make distclean", "make reallydistclean" did not work as expected by me, some auto-generated config files where still not deleted. - Make backups of your repo (frequently) - push the repo to a backup repo (frequently) - Use $GIT_DIR to move the repo out of your work tree: https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git.html - Prepare a patch that renames the *.idx files used by Git into *.gitidx, *.gidx, *.packidx, (and the *.pack into *.packdata ??) Hopefully you did not loose too much data, and if you have an idea how to improve things, you may consider sending a patch, improvements are possible and welcome. -- 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