multi workspace solution for GIT

Question

I would like to implement a multi-workspace version of git. The main goal is to have several independent workspaces using only one and single repository (without their own cloned repos). All these things will run on one host, or probably will be located on nfs and will be available on more hosts. Yes, I know there should be some restrictions, for example push and pull will work on the repo (probably there can be something like my-push). Branches will be somehow tied to the workspaces, also all workspaces will have its own HEAD. I would like to discuss here how can it be implemented, what will (or will not) work.

Answer 1

That was implemented long time ago in the form of the git-new-workdir script available in the "contrib" Git subdirectory [https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/contrib/workdir/git-new-workdir]. The basic idea this Unix shell script implements is to create a separate directory with ".git" subdirectory in it which links to the "real" one *but* leaving intact things like HEAD which are purely local. This allows to have any number of separate checkouts of different branches, all referring to a single repository.

Note that this script won't work on Windows as it makes use of symlinks which doesn't play together well with Windows.

Comments

Thanks, it looks promising (although it is quite old) Does anyone know about its restrictions, or does anyone have experiences with it?