Nesting branches in Git

Question

I have a repository on GitHub that has two branches, namely master and gh-pages. The master branch is basically a static website, but I use GitHub pages to have a project page with a "demo" button that lets the user see what the interface looks like. The project is a LightDM greeter theme, which can be run in the browser as well as by LightDM's Webkit greeter.

Only gh-pages can serve the HTML to the browser normally, but I keep all my work on the master branch.

My file structure is like this:

.
├── theme (master)
|   ├── index.html
|   └── ...
└── website (gh-pages)
    ├── demo -> contents of ../theme/
    ├── index.html
    └── ...

I tried symlinking demo to theme, as the two must contain the exact same contents, but Git responds with this error:

Project/website [ git commit -a "Made some changes"
fatal: 'demo/' is beyond a symbolic link

Next, I made hooks that synced the contents of theme and demo whenever I made a commit on either of the branches, but this method seems unnaturally complicated.

I'm basically trying to keep theme and demo linked to one another. Is there a clean way of doing this using Git?

Answer 1

I think the symlink is the cleanest solution, except:

• it should be ignored (if not, you will always get the "beyond a symbolic link" error)
• it should be generated automatically on checkout, through a post-checkout hook

The problem with hooks is that there aren't cloned around, so the user would still have to activate that specific hook.
Plus that may conflict with an existing post-checkout hook a user might have.

Another solution that won't conflict with any existing hook (but which will still need to be activated by said user cloning your repo) is a content filter driver:

When looking at the recognizable content of a specific file within website, you can decide to create that symlink.
The idea is that a content filter driver script (here a 'smudge' script) is something you can register in a .gitattributes file.
But the user will still need to declare that filter driver in his/her git config.