How to avoid Visual Studio rebuild after switching Git branches back and forth?

Question

I use Git for source control and build with Visual Studio 2008. Mostly I build on one branch (master). Often I need to do a code review and switch to another branch (develop) temporarily. I do not build code that I review and after review is finished I switch back to the original branch:

develop on master
commit everything (branch is clean)
build
switch to develop
do code review
switch to master
continue to develop on master
build (recompiles many files, not only ones modified in previous step)

If master and develop have different versions of one file, the modification date and time for that file are updated to the moment of checkout after switching branches in step 5. This causes Visual Studio to rebuild them in the step 8 despite the fact that souce code have not changed.

How can I avoid massive rebuilds when changing branches?

There is a good discussion about it here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10356165/avoid-recompilation-with-git-and-make — Marcio, Jun 04 '19 at 13:09

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 10 '12 at 00:46

3

As a workaround, it might be useful for you to do code reviews in a different clone from your development clone. That way, switching to a review branch won't change the files in your master clone, which won't cause VS to unnecessarily rebuild them.

answered Feb 10 '12 at 00:46

Greg Hewgill

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Thanks for the proposal, but my repository is huge - over 3GB. I would like to avoid wasting space. – Sergiy Belozorov Feb 10 '12 at 00:55
`git clone` on a local machine hardlinks files by default when possible, so a clone might take up less than 3GB on your disk. – Adam Rofer Feb 10 '12 at 01:10

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 10 '12 at 06:29

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You could script a checkout of just the differring files. So don't do a real checkout but alter the working directory to look like the other branch.

answered Feb 10 '12 at 06:29

Adam Dymitruk

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Sounds like a fairly complicated script. It is like reimplementing checkout functionality that preserves modification time. Or can I do this simpler? Existing script? – Sergiy Belozorov Feb 13 '12 at 09:23
Does Git actually store modification times or will I have to preserve them manually in such a script? – Sergiy Belozorov Feb 13 '12 at 09:29
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It would not be a complicated script. You can get a list of files from git diff --stat – Adam Dymitruk Feb 14 '12 at 09:07
Thanks for the tip. I will try to write one. – Sergiy Belozorov Feb 14 '12 at 17:51
Thanks. I didn't write the tool yet, but I guess this is the best answer I could get given my question. – Sergiy Belozorov Mar 04 '12 at 20:46

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 08 '20 at 03:07

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git worktree works. It let you work on multi-branches and without switching.

answered Apr 08 '20 at 03:07

yue huang

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Can you explain how to use `git workitree` to fix the original post problem? – Evandro Coan Jun 08 '21 at 20:26

How to avoid Visual Studio rebuild after switching Git branches back and forth?

3 Answers3