Question

We have a two developer team and want use git.

But I don’t know which way to use git is better:

1. Model with bare-repo. Here there are two local repos + one bare (main) repo throught with 2 developers are sync their commits.

2. Model without bare-repo. Here is two local repos, one of which is set as a remote to other.

I wonder what model is better to use and why? And especially what kind of difficulties can be while I would like to use second model.

Answer 1

You generally don’t push into people’s repositories in which they work, that would be troublesome. Bare repositories are for pushing into, while non-bare repos tend to have a developer in front of them and he’s responsible for managing it and pulling into it from places.

So: A model without central repository would contain two non-bare repos (each having the other as remote; consider the remote list as a repository’s “address book”).

During work, you would periodically pull changes from each other, but that would make some problems:

• some additional communication is needed (when to pull, which branches to pull)?
• you’d need to make sure that both repos are available (so that developer A wouldn’t need to wait for developer B to turn on his PC whenever he needs to pull something)

A bare, central repository helps with that:

• It’s supposed to be always available
• You decide which branches are in a “push-ready” state, what to share, what to keep to yourself
• It serves as a synchronization point: there’s always the current version so in case of divergence it’s always clear who’s supposed to merge.