Question

Is this feasible?

I would like to have the .git directory on another drive than the checkout directory.
I could not find a way to detach both.

The reason is: there is an exchange area on a very slow network drive and limited space and this is a real nightmare with timeouts. At least the repository operations (synchronization with a svn repository) could then be done fast enough to avoid the timeouts and file copy can be done afterwards on checkout with the poor performance. I could not find any way to cope with this situation (which is out of my control)

I would not like to but if there is no better suggestion I would replace it by a local git repository and rsync’ing the checkout dir in both directions to and from the slow drive.

I bet you have a better idea!

Answer 1

You can set the GIT_DIR environment variable:

If the $GIT_DIR environment variable is set then it specifies a path to use instead of ./.git for the base of the repository.

If setting an environment variable is infeasible for any reason, you can use the --git-dir option with any git command:

--git-dir=<path>

Set the path to the repository. This can also be controlled by setting the GIT_DIR environment variable. It can be an absolute path or relative path to current working directory.