Re: [PATCH 3/4] Automatically detect a bare git repository.

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Jan 1, 2007, 21:01 UTC
Message-ID: <20070101210103.GB26821@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <20061231125205.GB14286@thunk.org>

Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Sat, Dec 30, 2006 at 11:30:19PM -0500, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
> > Many users find it unfriendly that they can create a bare git
> > repository easily with `git clone --bare` but are then unable to
> > run simple commands like `git log` once they cd into that newly
> > created bare repository.  This occurs because we do not check to
> > see if the current working directory is a git repository.
> 
> Thanks for coding this up!   
> 
> If you do this, does this mean that we can also eliminate the global
> variable --bare, since git will be able to figure out we're in a bare
> repository all by itself?

Probably not. `git --bare foo` is a Poreclain-ish level option which has been supported for several versions. Removing it may cause pain for users to retrain their fingers to just ignore it.

Besides `git --bare` can be used in cases where the bare Git repository is actually located within another repository's working directory and the automatic detection is picking up the other repository's metadata and not the bare repository's metadata.

So I think --bare is still here to stay for a while. The new automatic detection just offers slightly less surprise for users.

-- 
Shawn.