git check-attr in bare repositories

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 29, 2010, 23:15 UTC
Message-ID: <20100329231501.GA28194@progeny.tock>
In-Reply-To: <19376.53419.640007.930897@winooski.ccs.neu.edu>

Eli Barzilay wrote:

> On Mar 29, Eli Barzilay wrote:
>> On Mar 27, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

[in a bare repository]

>>>  GIT_INDEX=tmp-index git check-attr "$@" &&

[...]

>> I tried that, but it doesn't work.  (I used GIT_INDEX_FILE.)

Yes, not sure how I confused myself.

git explicitly guards against that in attr.c.

	/*
	 * Read from parent directories and push them down
	 */
	if (!is_bare_repository() || direction == GIT_ATTR_INDEX) {

That check comes from v1.5.6-rc3~9^2 (Ignore .gitattributes in bare repositories, 2008-06-08). This is consistent with how bare repositories generally work: they are guarded against use with a populated index, since what filesystem tree would that index track?

To support your use case, it would be nice for check-attr to learn a --direction option. Maybe it would be safe to let check-attr read from the index in bare repositories by default anyway, since the index is usually missing anyway.

Properly supporting general work in a bare repository would require a larger effort. Maybe:

 - Teach code that checks is_bare_repository() to check
   get_git_work_tree() == NULL or similar instead.

 - Make the work_tree and git_dir variables the responsibility of the
   setup code.

 - If the user sets GIT_INDEX_FILE or GIT_WORK_TREE, let the setup
   code respect that wish even if core.bare is set.

Thoughts? Jonathan