Re: git ate my home directory :-(

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 25, 2013, 22:08 UTC
Message-ID: <20130325220822.GG1414@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vfvzjw334.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

>> In git versions including the patch 2cd83d10bb6b (setup: suppress
>> implicit "." work-tree for bare repos, 2013-03-08, currently in "next"
>> but not "master"), you can set GIT_IMPLICIT_WORK_TREE=0 to avoid this
>> behavior.
>
> WAT?

Is that false?

If I understand the history correctly, the ability to set the GIT_DIR envvar was meant to allow a person to keep their .git directory outside the worktree. So you can do:

	git init my-favorite-repo
	cd my-favorite-repo
	...work as usual...

	# cleaning time!
	mv .git ~/my-favorite-repo-metadata.git
	GIT_DIR=$HOME/my-favorite-repo-metadata.git; export GIT_DIR
	... work as usual...

If you want to set GIT_DIR and treat it as a bare repository, the sane way to do that is simply

	cd ~/my-favorite-bare-repository.git
	... use git as usual ...

But if something (for example relative paths used by your script) ties your cwd somewhere else, you might really want to do

	GIT_DIR=~/my-favorite-bare-repository.git; export GIT_DIR
	... work as usual ...

and as a side effect of Jeff's patch there is now a mechanism to do that:

	GIT_IMPLICIT_WORK_TREE=0; export GIT_IMPLICIT_WORK_TREE
	GIT_DIR=~/my-favorite-bare-repository.git; export GIT_DIR
	... work as usual ...

This is of course unsafe because it ties your usage to a specific version of git. And the variable is not advertised in the documentation.