[hinkley]

Subversion used to let you check out a subdirectory of a repo, which generally helped with this problem. The chapter on SVN in Beautiful Code does a great job of explaining how this works and why it helps with concurrent access to the repo.

This is a giant blind spot in Git, and none of the proposed workarounds come anywhere close to the tiny cognitive load of svn's answer to this problem.

But nobody on the git design committee seems to give a shit about cognitive load, so I'm probably just shouting into the tempest.