From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 20:59:32 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] allow setting GIT_WORK_TREE to "no work tree"
Message-ID: <7vwsphu7gr.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <7v4pclvmae.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

>> The other option is setting
>>
>>   GIT_MAGICALLY_SET_GIT_DIR_SO_DONT_ACT_LIKE_THE_USER_DID=1
>>
>> but I was hoping to avoid that.
>
> Yuck.  Let's then try your original (slightly redundant) one.

Oops, scratch that.  I was confused.

I do not like the magic GIT_WORK_TREE=: which is simply
illogical.  GIT_EDITOR=: made perfect sense (":" is actually a
command that succeeds without doing anything), but ":" does not
have anything to do with "there is no such path".

I was tempted to suggest GIT_WORK_TREE=/dev/null because that is
what "diff" uses to mark "this does not even exist", but that
feels dirty.