Tracking the untracked

[Giuseppe Bilotta <giuseppe.bilotta@gmail.com>]

<shameless plug alert />

On Wednesday 06 May 2009 03:19, Geoff Russell wrote:
> Basically, I'm trying to find a way of having a huge bunch of stuff in
> my repository and
> tracked, but which doesn't get pushed to the central program repository .. which
> has always just been source for us .. I figured I could stick it on a
> branch which doesn't get pushed.
> But that doesn't work for the reason mentioned.
>
> One solution would be to have a class of files that is "unversioned
> but tracked".
>
> Alternatively we could just bite the bullet and track everything.

I do realize I'm a month late in replying to this email, so I guess in
the end you bit the bullet, but I was perusing the mailing list
archive and this post catched my attention because it's a possible use
case for Zit, the single-file Git-based tracker I've been developing
on and off ( http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/InterfacesFrontendsAndTools#Zit
). I have never thought about using Zit this way, but I see no
problem. Create a .zit directory (by default zit tracks each file
using a git dir named .filename.git, but if .zit/ exists it'll use
.zit/filename.git), add that and all tracked but untracked files to
the gitignore file, and you'll be able to track them with no noise in
your standard git repository.

The only possible underside is that with zit each file is tracked
independently, so if you want to track them all together you'll have
to think of something else. Also, zit isn't very rename-friendly
(yet), so it might not be that good a choice for you if you do a lot
of renaming.


-- 
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta