Re: [PATCH 00/12] Fix various overly aggressive protections in 2.45.1 and friends

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 28, 2024, 17:47 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqzfs94ynb.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <8353645a-a684-417a-8b0e-d8cbd7da6b5a@gmail.com>

Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

>> And there is a good reason _not_ to write stuff inside the `.git/`
>> directory unless you happen to be, well, Git itself: Git makes no
>> guarantees whatsoever that you can write into that directory whatever you
>> want. A future Git version might even write a file `.git/annex`, breaking
>> `git-annex`' assumptions, and that'd be totally within the guarantees Git
>> makes.
>
> This seems a bit harsh - many tools store their state under .git/ and
> I think it makes sense for them to do so as it avoids creating
> untracked files in the working copy. I would hope that we'd be
> considerate of widely used tools such as 'git annex' when adding new
> paths under .git/

Yes, a .git/annex file _can_ happen, but between civilized developer groups, such a thing would not happen without a good reason. If we have no good reason (apparently you and I did not think of any) to create such a file, "it can happen" is a poor straw-man, as we would be aiming to work well together.

Yes, when we have a symbolic link as a tracked content, updating the target of the link when we need to update it is simply a bug, and it does not matter if it points at a file inside our own repository, or a file inside a different and unrelated repository that is owned by the same user, or a file in the user's home directory. Our own repository is not all that special from that perspective, and a change to penalize symbolic links that point into our repository specifically probably did make a bad choice.

Thanks.