Do a “git export” (like “svn export”)?

I’ve been wondering whether there is a good “git export” solution that creates a copy of a tree without the .git repository directory. There are at least three methods I know of:

  1. git clone followed by removing the .git repository directory.
  2. git checkout-index alludes to this functionality but starts with “Just read the desired tree into the index…” which I’m not entirely sure how to do.
  3. git-export is a third-party script that essentially does a git clone into a temporary location followed by rsync --exclude=".git" into the final destination.

None of these solutions really strike me as being satisfactory. The closest one to svn export might be option 1, because both require the target directory to be empty first. But option 2 seems even better, assuming I can figure out what it means to read a tree into the index.

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