The purpose of this was to find out where various GUI apps were writing their changes, and to sync my dotfiles to github. (I had a similar strategy in place using svn, but I've since mostly abandoned svn from my workflow, and was really only deciding which of hg or git to switch to)
Little did I know that I had just caused myself a bunch of pain.
$ cd
$ git init
$ vi .gitignire
$ git add -A
So I added a wildcard to .gitignore and thought nothing more of it, until....
in eclipse, stuck like this
indexing repo tomhodder....
basically, that I was informed by the folks in #git on freenode that gitignore causes the resources listed to been hidden from git, but not ignored by git. hence they are still in the repository, and hence commands like
$ git status
still return the repo status, even from ignored directories, and this was causing eclipse to have fits.
My work-around is to rename the git repo dir, in order that it is actually ignored by the default tools, and I can access my home dir git repo using an alias like so;
$ cd
$ mv .git .git_alt
$ alias altgit='git --git-dir=.git_alt'
source ~/bashrc
$ git status
fatal: Not a git repository (or any parent up to mount point /home)
Stopping at filesystem boundary (GIT_DISCOVERY_ACROSS_FILESYSTEM not set).
$ altgit status
# On branch master
#
# Initial commit
...
which is fine for my use-case.
The caveat was that, I found if you set the alias first, say in this order;
$ alias altgit='git --git-dir=.git_alt'
$ altgit init
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/tomhodder/.git_alt/
$ altgit status
fatal: This operation must be run in a work tree
Something fucks up.
I would raise a question, or a bug on that, but it seems that whenever I ask on #git whatever is the issue, that was expected git behaviour, and that my problem is MY FUCKING FAULT, and that somewhere I should have rtfm
