GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORY

I put my home directory under git (recently converted from bzr), but since I have some subdirectories under $HOME that are not under git (and some that are) I want to stop e.g. `git status` from traversing up into $HOME. For example, I have a ~/projects directory with lots of subdirectories so when I'm in e.g. my CPython Mercurial checkout (~/projects/python), I don't want git to go higher than ~/projects

GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES seems like exactly the thing I want, so I set it to ::$HOME/projects and this works great... unless I'm actually in ~/projects in which case `git status` shows me the status of the $HOME repository.

I tried setting this to just $HOME, but that has the undesired side-effect of blocking $HOME status when I'm in a subdirectory that *is* part of the base repo, e.g. ~/env. IOW, with GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES=$HOME and I cd into ~/env, I don't get any status.

So I'm wondering whether this should be considered a bug in git, or if there's some other way to handle this corner case, or whether it's working as intended and I just have to live with it.

Cheers, -Barry