From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:06:37 GMT
Subject: Re: git ate my home directory :-(
Message-ID: <7vboa7w2vm.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20130325214343.GF1414@google.com>

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.

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.