From: Adam Majer <adamm@zombino.com>
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2023 09:43:28 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] setup: recognize bare repositories with packed-refs
Message-ID: <ab332078-dd49-41cf-a3d1-6a67a507b122@zombino.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqbkbppbrd.fsf@gitster.g>

On 11/20/23 00:24, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Adam Majer <adamm@zombino.com> writes:
> 
>> In a garbage collected bare git repository, the refs/ subdirectory is
>> empty.  In use-cases when such a repository is directly added into
>> another repository, it no longer is detected as valid.
> 
> Josh & Glen [*], isn't this a layout that we  explicitly discourage and
> eventually plan to forbid anyway?
> 
> *1* who worked on e35f202b (setup: trace bare repository setups, 2023-05-01)

This is fair enough. Completely removing embedded git repos would cause 
some pain in test suites as it was discussed in the thread for that 
commit[1]. Gitea (for example) has a few dozen embedded bare 
repositories for tests.

In either case, running `git gc` on a bare repository makes it no longer 
detectable as a git repository after checkout, GIT_DIR or not. This 
seems to be unintentional and not linked to the other discussion.

- Adam