From ~/ home directory in Linux, I would like to create a repository of useful files that I have customized over time. Specifically, for example, files like ~/.bashrc or ~/.vimrc.

Now, the home directory also has a .vim folder within which there are multiple plugins I have cloned. For e.g., ~/.vim/plugged/vim-snippets. There is also the .git/ folder within this folder at ~/.vim/plugged/vim-snippets/.git. These are repositories I cloned merely to use as a user. They are developed and maintained by someone else.

The presence of this latter .git/ folder seems to prevent being able to track anything within the ~/.vim/plugged/vim-snippets/ folder or its subfolders from the repository I would like to create in ~/. Some of the files within ~/.vim/plugged/vim-snippets/ that I have customized and changed include ~/.vim/plugged/vim-snippets/UltiSnips/tex.snippets ,for instance, which contains my customization for LaTeX files. I would like to put this file under my personal source control repository under ~/.

Regardless of having !/.vim/plugged/vim-snippets/ in ~/.gitignore the tex.snippets file is not tracked. However, everything else being the same, removing the .git folder from ~/.vim/plugged/vim-snippets does track the tex.snippets file.

Is there anyway this problem can be resolved? I looked at submodules, but note that I do not want to commit to my repository under ~/ everything under ~/.vim/plugged/vim-snippets/ which seems to be the problem addressed by submodules. I only customize one or two files within ~/.vim/plugged/vim-snippets/ that I would like to commit to my personal source control repository under ~/. Is deleting the .git/ folder from /.vim/plugged/vim-snippets/ the only way to achieve this?

CodePudding user response：

There's no Git way to do quite what you want—or at least, what I think you want, which is a kind of overlay/interleave thing.

I have, for my own personal use, my own personal dot-files system, and I would have the same issue if I customized directly-cloned repositories. For now, if I did that, I'd go ahead and use submodules (or add something much like them to my personal dot-files system). So far I have been fortunate in that the additional vim goodies I use are already sufficiently customizable without touching the original repository, that I don't have to do that. So I have not actually implemented either of the tricks you're talking about.

What's really needed here, though, is a way to say "use a tree from some Git repository's commit, but use only these parts of it and/or overlay these other items into it". This doesn't fit with the Git model so the clone, if any, of the other Git repository should go outside the assembled tree-of-files, and the tree-of-files should be able to live outside the Git repository.