Re: [PATCH 3/3] setup: always honor GIT_WORK_TREE and core.worktree

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 19, 2011, 19:24 UTC
Message-ID: <7v4o94u26f.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <4D373296.6030101@seznam.cz>

Maaartin <grajcar1@seznam.cz> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> On 11-01-19 13:42, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> Unfortunately the existence of GIT_WORK_TREE makes it tempting to
>> use without setting GIT_DIR.
>
> Maybe I'm asking nonsense, but why should I always use both? On the
> command line, I either cd to my (alternate) working tree and use GIT_DIR
> only or the other way round.

As long as you were at the root level of these two sets of "working trees", you don't need GIT_WORK_TREE at all.

We originally had only GIT_DIR and people who wanted to use a working tree without an embedded .git (hence having to use GIT_DIR) complained that they cannot work from subdirectories while cd'ing around, because you declare that you are at the root of your working tree by using GIT_DIR (naturally, there is no discovery of .git so we won't know where the root is). GIT_WORK_TREE was added to augment the mechanism to allow them to specify where their root is, so that they can set both and then chdir around inside their working tree.