Unable to work effectively with Git locally

Question

Please, see Greg's answer.

I do not understand Daniel's statement at the thread completely:

Why are you manually copying files around at all? Surely you should just add them to the repo, then check out and commit as necessary. I don't see the need to move the files around - that seems to defeat the whole purpose of a local checkout.

I am at the moment using rsync in coping files from

1. ~/bin/
2. ~/ (only some dot-files)

Daniel's statement suggests me that there may be a better way to do the workflow locally.

I am not sure what he means by

Surely you should just add them to the repo, then check out and commit as necessary.

It seems that he is not speaking about git-add.

How can you add files to your repo, not with git-add?

Answer 1

I believe what Daniel was referring to is using Git to manage the files in particular directories in place, without copying them around. For example, starting without any Git repository, you might:

cd ~/bin
git init
git add .

Now, your ~/bin directory contains a ~/bin/.git repository and you can git add and git diff right from the ~/bin directory.

Answer 2

1) I back up my .dotfiles as follows:

a) Create a directory ~/dotfiles

b) link dotfile into ~/dotfiles/ e.g.

ln ~/.bashrc ~/dotfiles/.bashrc  # NB Must be hard links

c)

cd ~/dotfiles
git init
git add .  
git commit -m "Initial commit of dotfiles"

2) You can also refer to a Git repo not in the current directory tree by exporting the environment string GIT_DIR .e.g (assuming at repo at ~/myrepos/repo1)

a)

 export GIT_DIR=~/myrepos/repo1/.git

b)

 git add .profile  
 git commit -m "added .profile"

Does that help at all?