Sharing git repo symlinks between Windows and WSL

Found a workaround. I created alias in wsl to Git for windows: alias git="/mnt/c/Program\ Files/Git/bin/git.exe". Works perfect!

This issue occurs because Windows and Linux (or at least the emulated version) disagree about the size of a symlink. On Windows, a symlink's size is in blocks, so a 6-character symlink will be 4096 bytes in size. On Linux, a symlink's size is the number of bytes it contains (in this example, 6).

One of the things that Git writes into the index to keep track of whether a file has changed is the size. When you perform any sort of update of the index, such as with git reset --hard, Git writes all of this metadata into the index, including the size. When you run git status, git checks this metadata to determine if it matches, and if not, it marks the file as modified.

It is possible to control whether certain information is checked in the index, since some tools can produce bogus info (for example, JGit doesn't write device and inode numbers), but size is always checked, because it is seen as a good indicator of whether a file has changed.

Since this is a fundamental disagreement between how Windows and how WSL see the symlink, this really can't be fixed. You could try asking the Git for Windows project if they'd be willing to work around this issue in Git for Windows, but I suspect the answer is probably going to be no since changing it would likely have a performance impact for all Windows users.