Re: What commands can and can not be used with bare repositories?

From: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@fieldses.org>
Date: Dec 31, 2006, 01:57 UTC
Message-ID: <20061231015728.GB20348@fieldses.org>
In-Reply-To: <E1H0poE-0000qd-Ee@candygram.thunk.org>

On Sat, Dec 30, 2006 at 08:48:22PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> What isn't documented is what commands actually can deal with a bare
> repository.  At the moment, it looks like a bare repository can be a
> target of a git pull, push, and merge commands, and it can be a source
> for a git clone, but that seems to be about it.  All other commands,
> such as "git log" blow up with the error message "Not a git repository".
> This to me seems a bit lame, since why isn't a "bare repository" also a
> "git repository"?  All of the information is there for "git log" to
> work.  Commands that require a working directory obviously can't work,
> but there are plenty of git commands for which there's no reason why
> they shouldn't be able to operate on a bare repository.  For example,
> "git repack", "git log", "git fetch", etc.

Yup. Anything that should work actually does; you just need to know to use one of:

	GIT_DIR=. git log
	git --git-dir=. log
	git --bare log

Why git couldn't figure this out for you, I don't know....

--b.