/* compiler workaround */ - what was the issue?

Duy,

In https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/commit/b3c96fb158f05152336f167076f5d81d23c3a5e5 (split-index: strip pathname of on-disk replaced entries, 13 Jun 2014) Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> you have

read-cache.c#L1790 (in that commit, now ~L1873)

    int saved_namelen = saved_namelen; /* compiler workaround */

Which then becomes an MSVC compile warning C4700: uninitialized local variable.

I'm wondering what was the compiler workaround being referred to? i.e. why does it need that tweak? There's no mention of the reason in the commit message.

There are a few other occurences of this same initialisation issue, so I was wondering if it's still neded? Or should I just get MSVC to ignore it, which may hide other issues..

-- Philip