symlink - git assume unchanged vs skip worktree - ignoring a symbolic link

Question

I have a problems with a git repository and windows. The problem is that the git repository has a linux symbolic link in it and with developers running windows, that obviously does not work. Now since that symbolic link should never change, I want to find a way to delete that on developers and add a folder in its place (which is what the symbolic points to) but have git ignore those particular changes. Now I can remove the symbolic links, create a folder of the same name and just add a .gitignore that ignores everything. Now as far as making sure git ignore the removal of the symbolic link, I have found two possible solution while researching. The solutions I found are:

git update-index --assume-unchanged [FILE]
git update-index --skip-worktree [FILE]

My question is which option would work the best? I want to make sure once I do this that it never gets undone unless I specifically do it. I want to make sure reverting, resetting, creating branches, merging, etc... all work fine.

Answer 1

Both options have problems. --assume-unchanged resets itself whenever the index gets discarded (e.g. git reset), so that will probably trip you up sooner or later. Same goes for --skip-worktree... however, you can maintain a local list of files to not check out, so that the skip-worktree bit is set again automatically whenever necessary. Here are the steps:

• Set core.sparseCheckout to true for the repository.
• Create a file .git/info/sparse-checkout containing two patterns: * to include everything and !/foo to exclude the symlink foo (/ means anchor to top level).
• Now, manually set the skip-worktree bit, then delete the symlink.

Now you can go on without having to fear that git will automatically commit the directory, but note that you will still run into problems if someone explicitly runs git add on the directory or any file in it.

[Edited to add:] After further discussion, we identified a solution to that last problem: put a .gitignore file with a * pattern inside the directory.