Git on a Flash Drive

Had some serious trouble figuring this one out...

The Idea: Use Git for source control on my Debian laptop, and keep a copy of the repository on a USB Flash Drive.

It should work something like this:

on flash drive:

mkdir project

cd project

git --bare init

on desktop:

git clone /path/to/usb/drive

make changes

git add .

git commit -m "did something"

git push origin master

But it didn't quite work that way

git clone resulted in the error messages "unable to chdir or not a git archive"

and "The remote end hung up unexpectedly"

The problem here is one of case-sensitivity. Git looks for a file named HEAD.

ls

branches config description head hooks info objects refs

but HEAD is lower case on the flash drive.

Attempts to Fix:

• Renaming it to head results in an error (its already there).
• Renaming to a temporary name and then to HEAD results in head showing up again.

So I look around on the drive and find out that NOT every file which has its name downcased. I check properties, and the flash drive is mounted using VFAT. In my configuration (Applications/System Tools/Configuration Editor) I check the VFAT settings (system/storage/default_options/vfat) and see a mount option of shortname=lower. I change this to mixed, remount the floppy and head is now HEAD.

Go google shortname=lower to find the world's opinion of this default...

Anyway, Git works on USB Flash Drives!

Dear Linus

Mr. Torvalds,

Thanks for writing the Git source control system. One problem however, it is not yet supported on Windows from what I see. Just on a Mac and Linux. Not even Cygwin.

Don't git me wrong, I love subversion, but why Linux over Windows :) We want to play too.

Love,

The Schmitzer