Re: [PATCH 3/3] Allow whole-tree operations to be started from a subdirectory

From: Josef Weidendorfer <josef.weidendorfer@gmx.de>
Date: Jan 14, 2007, 00:11 UTC
Message-ID: <200701140111.20671.Josef.Weidendorfer@gmx.de>
In-Reply-To: <7vac0orml9.fsf_-_@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Friday 12 January 2007 21:56, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> This updates five commands (merge, pull, rebase, revert and cherry-pick)
> so that they can be started from a subdirectory.
> 
> This may not actually be what we want to do.  These commands are
> inherently whole-tree operations, and an inexperienced user may
> mistakenly expect a "git pull" from a subdirectory would merge
> only the subdirectory the command started from.

Yes, this IMHO is a problem.

Why not add a general "--top" option to the "git" wrapper, to temporarily let git change to the toplevel while running the command?

The wish to allow git-fetch from subdirectories is the inconvenience to have to cd up, and later down. This is avoided by running "git --top fetch", and theses people should be happy.

Yet, if the command outputs some relative paths, the user is very well aware that these paths are from the toplevel, as he explicitly specified "--top".

Aside from this, the "--top" options sometimes could be handy even for other git commands.

And when e.g. git fetch is run from a subdirectory, we could add to the (now better) error message:

You need to run this command from the toplevel of the working tree. Alternatively, run "git --top ..." to temporary switch to the toplevel while running the git command.

Josef