GnuCash+git development process with multiple branches?

[Derek Atkins]

Hi all,

Last week I just upgraded my main laptop from Fedora 15 to Fedora 18.
One of the side effects of this change was that PERL got updates from
5.12 to 5.16, and SVK (which I've been using for years) no longer
works.  SVK has long-since been abandoned (back in 2010) which basically
means I'm not being forced to switch over to git-svn.  Yay me.

One of the things that SVK allowed me to do was to have a single copy of
the repository locally and then from there I could check out multiple
branches into different WC directories.  Whenver I wanted to pull
changes from the upstream server (svk sync) it would pull those changes
once into the central repo (on all branches, of course) and then I could
pull those updates into my WCs (svk update).

I want to replicate this behavior using git/git-svn.  Part of my
reasoning is that if I'm working on 5 different branches I don't feel
like I need 5 full copies of the repo (although I doubt there is a way
to get git to do that).  However, more importantly, when I pull updates
from the upstream server I don't want to have to fetch those changes
independently for each checked-out branch/WC.  My reasoning for this is
that for some of my (non-GnuCash) work the pipe is rather thin and/or
behind a VPN firewall so I'd like to pull everything once and then
spread locally.

So I guess this boils does to more of a general git question than
specifically gnucash, but ---- how do you work with multiple branches
simultaneously?  This is particularly important because of having to
dcommit back upstream.

My first attempt was to do a git clone --bare and then figuring I could
git-clone from there for my branches.  It converts my 'svk sync' to a
'git fetch' in the bare repo and 'svk update' to a 'git-update' (or git
pull) from my WCs.  Alas, this doesn' *quite* work because the git fetch
fails with:

Fetching origin
fatal: Couldn't find remote ref HEAD
error: Could not fetch origin

This is probably because refs/heads/ is empty in the bare repo?

So what do you all do?  I'm thinking that once I figure it out I'll
update the GnuCash Git Wiki Page, although honestly I'm probably the
last dev to migrate to git :-P

Thanks!

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available