As winter clouds set in, I have to ration my solar power and have been less active than usual.
It seems that the OSX 10.8.2 git init hanging issue has indeed been
resolved, by building the app on 10.8.2. Very good news! Autobuilder setup is
in progress.
Finally getting stuck in to direct mode git-merge handling. It's
not possible to run git merge in a direct mode tree, because it'll
see typechanged files and refuse to do anything.
So the only way to use git merge, rather than writing my own merge engine,
is to use --work-tree to make it operate in a temporary work tree directory
rather than the real one.
When it's run this way, any new, modified, or renamed files will be added
to the temp dir, and will need to be moved to the real work tree.
To detect deleted files, need to use git ls-files --others, and
look at the old tree to see if the listed files were in it.
When a merge conflict occurs, the new version of the file will be in the temp directory, and the old one in the work tree. The normal automatic merge conflict resolution machinery should work, with just some tweaks to handle direct mode.