Re: git ate my home directory :-(

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Mar 26, 2013, 07:57 UTC
Message-ID: <384BCFE976364F1EA6E56306566D003A@PhilipOakley>
In-Reply-To: <7vboa7w2vm.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2013 10:06 PM

Show 14 quoted lines

> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Richard Weinberger wrote:
>>
>>> In my scripts I'm setting GIT_DIR to use git-fetch and git-reset 
>>> without changing the
>>> current working directory all the time.
>>
>> Yeah, for historical reasons GIT_WORK_TREE defaults to $(pwd) when
>> GIT_DIR is explicitly set.
>
> And it *WILL* be that way til the end of time.  Unless you are at
> the top level of your working tree, you are supposed to tell where
> the top level is with GIT_WORK_TREE when you use GIT_DIR.  Always.

Should this important warning be part of the git(1) documentation on the environment variables (and possibly other places) given the consequences of this case? It wasn't something I'd appreciated from a simple reading.

Show 7 quoted lines

>
> And that is the answer you should be giving here, not implicit
> stuff, which is an implementation detail to help aliases.  I do not
> know how things will break when the end user sets and exports it to
> the environment, and I do not think we would want to make any
> promise on how it works.
> --

Philip