From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:01:32 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] allow setting GIT_WORK_TREE to "no work tree"
Message-ID: <20080206110131.GA4167@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <47A98F07.4000402@viscovery.net>

On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 11:42:15AM +0100, Johannes Sixt wrote:

> > The special value is a blank GIT_WORK_TREE; it could be any
> > value, but this should not conflict with any user values
> > (and as a bonus, you can now tell git "I don't have a work
> > tree" with "GIT_WORK_TREE= git", though I suspect the use
> > case for that is limited).
> 
> Hrm. Unfortunately, on Windows there is no such thing as an empty
> environment string. setenv(x, "") *removes* the environment variable.

Bleh. Maybe "GIT_WORK_TREE=:"? It doesn't make sense by itself since we
don't try to execute the contents of GIT_WORK_TREE, but it's unlikely to
be used by a user, and I believe there was recent talk of making
"GIT_EDITOR=:" work.

The other option is setting

  GIT_MAGICALLY_SET_GIT_DIR_SO_DONT_ACT_LIKE_THE_USER_DID=1

but I was hoping to avoid that.

-Peff