From: Jay Soffian Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:06:46 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] allow setting GIT_WORK_TREE to "no work tree" Message-ID: <76718490802071006j9eaa4bctedc18f4a62e2b91c@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: On Feb 7, 2008 7:33 AM, Johannes Schindelin wrote: > > On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Jay Soffian wrote: > > > Is using something like "__GIT_WORK_TREE_NOT_SET__" that terrible? > > Yes. First: it looks more like a C constant than a proper environment > variable. Second: what to do _sanely_, when both GIT_WORK_TREE and > GIT_WORK_TREE_NOT_SET are true? Sorry I was unclear. The discussion was about using a special value to denote "this is not set." So I meant something like: GIT_WORK_TREE="__GIT_WORK_TREE_NOT_SET" There may not be precedent in git, but it is not unusual to use a double-underbar prefix to denote private names and/or values. While in theory a user could have a directory named as such, it would seem highly unlikely. This looks a little cleaner to me than using ":", " ", or "/dev/null". j.