Question

I have a repository which contains Content & Source files. Developers should work only on source files. To save space, developers should not clone the content files (which are in GB) to their local repo. Source files are not present in the project as sub-modules rather they are in the same location where the contents are.

My approach is like this – I created a branch Source from Master and then deleted the content files from that branch. And I published the same branch for cloning to the developers.

As I am merging the changes from the Source branch back to Master, the content files are getting deleted in Master. How to restrict it? And if it is not possible then is there a way to achieve my requirement of having a separate branch / clone having only filtered files i.e. the source files in it?

Answer 1

Use git-merge to merge the two branches, and then git-revert to remove the commit that deleted the content files.

% git checkout Master
% git merge Source
% git revert <content-removal-commit-id>

Or you could do it the other way around, and remove the content-removal commit before
you merge into Master. It’s a little more complex, but it might keep your Master history a little cleaner.

% git checkout Source
% git branch SourceMerge
% git checkout SourceMerge
% git revert <content-removal-commit-id>
% git checkout Master
% git merge SourceMerge