What's the best practice to “git clone” into an existing folder?

Question

I have a working copy of the project, without any source control meta data. Now, I\'d like to do the equivalent of git-clone into this folder, and keep my local changes.

Answer 1

Don't clone, fetch instead. In the repo:

git init
git remote add origin $url_of_clone_source
git fetch origin
git checkout -b master --track origin/master # origin/master is clone's default

Then you can reset the tree to get the commit you want:

git reset origin/master # or whatever commit you think is proper...

and you are like you cloned.

The interesting question here (and the one without answer): How to find out which commit your naked tree was based on, hence to which position to reset to.