From: Bello Olamide <belkid98@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2026 11:39:19 GMT
Subject: Re: [Outreachy PATCH v2] environment: move "core.attributesFile" into repo-setting
Message-ID: <CAD=f0L-ge9FfNh04Nu05eg9Q6t_gtLaPi2=jiT1LXOjF20OO2Q@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAOLa=ZTOKvEQaMxymi+mRcqyNy4bZ4JbK2HPtq6CeewjHMo_=g@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, 5 Jan 2026 at 12:09, Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Olamide Caleb Bello <belkid98@gmail.com> writes:
> [snip]
>
> > @@ -927,8 +921,13 @@ static void bootstrap_attr_stack(struct index_state *istate,
> >       }
> >
> >       /* home directory */
> > -     if (git_attr_global_file()) {
> > -             e = read_attr_from_file(git_attr_global_file(), flags);
> > +     if (istate && istate->repo)
> > +             repo = istate->repo;
> > +     else
> > +             repo = the_repository;
> > +     attributes_file_path = repo_settings_get_attributesfile_path(repo);
> > +     if (attributes_file_path) {
> > +             e = read_attr_from_file(attributes_file_path, flags);
> >               push_stack(stack, e, NULL, 0);
> >       }
> >
>
> For my own understanding, when can `istate` be NULL?
>

Thank you for your question Karthik.
So it was stated in a comment in `apply.c:read_old_data():2340` that
`git apply without --index/cached
should never look at the index because the target file may not be in
the index yet
and we may not be in a Git repository.`
So NULL is passed to convert_to_git() in place of `istate`.

So when we do
`git apply patch.file` `istate` is NULL, but when we do
`git apply --cached patch.file`, `istate` is not NULL.

Bello