alan.lamielle.net

While working at NCAR, I stumbled into a situation where I needed to use Git over an sshfs mounted directory.  After beating on git and looking at its source code and not making much progress, I finally found a very simple solution related to how I mount the sshfs directory.

I’ve been working on a codebase at NCAR for my summer SiParCS internship that is based in an Subversion repository.  However, the code I have is unreleased and I haven’t been given commit access to the repo.  Also, I hate the feeling of working on code that isn’t properly versioned as I’ve lost work one too many times and never want that to happen again.

While working, I found myself needing multiple versions of some code I was working on (where each version was gathering different sets of data).  Rather than commenting in/out various sections of the code, git branches would work perfectly in this situation.

Keep in mind that the code I’m working on resides on an AIX front-end node to a reasonably powerful supercomputer.  The tool support on this machine is lacking, I have no zsh, updated vim, git, etc.  To get around this tool deficiency, I mount the code I’m working on locally on my machine using sshfs.  This works great!  However…  I still have no version control, so I decide to attempt to add the code to a git repository.

I started by removing the .svn directories using one of my favorite shell aliases, svnnuke.  I then created a git repo with git init.  So far so good.  Finally, I attempted to add all of the files to the repo for the initial commit with git add ..  However, this produced the error: 'fatal: Unable to write new index file'.  After searching through the git source for the location of the error string and trying many variations of various git commands, I was stuck.

This morning I approached the problem again, from a different angle.  I realized the problem was most likely not with git, but with the fact that I’m working over sshfs.  Therefore, I may solve the problem with how I am mounting the remote filesystem.  I googled for ‘git sshfs’ and found an article discussing Bazaar and SSHFS.  This article containted the solution to my problem: mount the remote filesystem using sshfs with the -oworkaround=rename option.  Poof!  Git is suddenly working and I’m hacking on the code versioned under git and all its glory!