Some background: My company's service model began as an appliance-based server model. We would send our client a server with Windows Server 2003/2008 on it, pre-loaded with a webserver and our software. We're moving all of the client-specific configuration to a Git repository, and using sparse-checkout to make each server only contain what's necessary for the client's software to function properly.
While setting up sparse-checkout, we've run into a huge inconsistency. We'll do
git clone [email protected]:ourclientconfigrepo.git .
git config core.sparsecheckout true
echo www.thisclient.com/ > .git/info/sparse-checkout
git read-tree -m -u HEAD
The expected result would be
ls
www.thisclient.com/
but we get
ls
www.thisclient.com/
www.randomclient1.com/
www.randomclient2.com/
www.randomclient3.com/
I've tried multiple times, in a new directory each time, and the issue has happened each time. My ju-git-su fails me here. We're using git version 1.8.1.msysgit.1.
Thanks for your help, let me know if I need to supply more information.
Clarification: The repository is nothing but our client's configuration directories. Each client has a different directory in the repository, and we're trying to sparse-checkout on each client's individual server, so we're trying to exclude everything except for the client in question.
Just an update, turns out it was something wonky with Windows folder permissions, and Git was trying to delete non-empty directories. Fixed it by deleting the empty folders. Thanks for any and all attempts at helping!
A partial solution: According to git-read-tree(1), you can exclude specific files by putting a ! in front of the file name. This may be a miswrite, however (meaning that that's for directories as well, not files).
I'll continue investigating.
According to https://stackoverflow.com/a/11222033/1210278, you can manually mark directories with git update-index --skip-worktree www.randomclient1.com/.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/9575837/1210278 implies that exclusion is only for directories, and says that there are some bugs with it.