I think you mis-understood.
The normal way of handling this is to NOT DO DEVELOPMENT IN YOUR
DEPLOYMENT TREE!
It's almost always a bad idea to develop in the tree that is also where
you "export" things, and if you find git annoying in this respect, ask
yourself why pretty much *every*single*scm*out*there* makes their
infrastructure even more noticeable (eg CVS subdirectories in every single
directory etc)
So while you can do various tricks (symlinking ".git", using GIT_DIR, etc
etc) to get the .git contents out of your worktree, the thing is, the
correct thing to do is almost always to simply re-think the whole problem,
and come at it the other way: rather than getting .git out of your
development tree, you should consider getting your development tree out of
your deployment area!
Let me do a few examples of why this is a good idea:
- the whole point of development trees and SCM's (and that's *especially*
true with git) is how you can try things out, go backwards in time, and
generally just do *development*.
If you do that in what is your public deployment area, you're already
very limited. Not only may you not want to make that .git directory
accessible to others (while you *do* obviously want to make the
deployment itself), you also end up exposing things like your
management scripts and source code along with "generated files" etc
that are the things you actually want to deploy.
Yes, it's certainly quite possible that you simply don't have any
management scripts etc, and that you don't generate any files, and you
simply want to just deploy the exact files that you also want to track.
But that really is a fairly unusual thing to do.
- with git in particular, you lose a lot of the capabilities if you are
forcing yourself to have "deployment == development tree". Things like
switching branches for managing different versions suddenly are
painful, because you're artificially forcing a 1:1 relationship between
"development" and "deployment".
- Most sane people want to deploy and test separately. In particular, you
want to test *before* you deploy. People make mistakes, they don't want
to show them. Or there are consistency requirements, and/or you simply
want to deploy to multiple sites simultaneously. All of which really
re-inforces the "develop separately" mentality, where the actual
deployment is then a separate "now I'm ready, let's push out the
result".
Now, maybe none of these things are issues at all for you. Good for you.
But hopefully this explains why most people don't have your issues, and
why people try to tell you that "deployment software" is a separate thing
from "source control management", and you often want both, and _want_ to
keep them separate.
Linus
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