How to handle symbolic link in my git repo

Question

I have two git repos, A and B under separate paths.

There is a sub-folder in one repo (A/subfolder) that contains some data files. On my local machine I have a symbolic link in B to access these files. This way I do not have to maintain two separate folders with identical contents. It works great.

The problem is that when I push these repos to github, the symbolic links in B do not work on other machines (as expected). What is the best way to handle this so that:

• 1) I only have to maintain one physical directory on my local machine;

• 2) Each git repo will contain the physical contents of subfolder so that users could clone either repo without issues;

• 3) When I pull from the repo to my local machine, it does not create a duplicate copy of the files in subfolder

Answer 1

My solution was to use hard links instead of symbolic links. Hard links are not natively supported by OS X, but this tool implements them:

https://github.com/selkhateeb/hardlink