git grep --no-index and absolute paths don't work?

Hi,

I'm currently  totally confused, that a

    git grep --no-index foo /usr/include

does not work. I know that the documentation says "in the current directory" for the --no-index flag. But this does not work ether:

    cd ~; git grep --no-index foo ~/.bashrc

They all fail with 'is outside repository'. Which is for itself vary misleading, because I intentionally said --no-index.

Any input is appreciate.

Thanks.

Bert

On Fri, 2011-10-21 at 08:34 +0200, Bert Wesarg wrote:

The rest of the sentence reads ", not just those tracked by git" which implies that the files tracked by git are also searched. This requires a git repository.

Git is a tool that works on git repositories. Some commands may work outside of a repository, like ls-remote when given an URL or init (for obvious reasons) but it's not something that should be expected, especially for commands that read files from the working tree.

Why are you trying to use git's grep command outside a repository? Why isn't 'grep -nr foo /usr/include/' good enough?

   cmn

* Carlos Martín Nieto <cmn@elego.de> [11-10-21 09:09]:

git grep --no-index works outside of git repositories (at least with relative paths).

There are a few nice things about git's grep, which GNU grep does not have:

  - automatic usage of pager
  - support for pathspecs (can be emulated with `find ...`)
  - support for boolean combinations of regular expressions

  -- Lars.

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 13:49, Lars Noschinski <lars@public.noschinski.de> wrote:

- thread parallel

bert

Bert Wesarg <bert.wesarg@googlemail.com> writes:

I think "in the current directory" is just contrasting with "in the work tree, ..." at the beginning of the DESCRIPTION section. We could say "in the files" instead for clarity, and then add "when pathspec is not given, files in the current directory is searched" or something.

The intent of "--no-index", originating from "git diff --no-index", is to allow git tools to be used in non-git context, i.e. to files on the filesystem.

"git grep --no-index" which is a later invention in the 1.7.0 era didn't fully ignore "git"ness, and one such instance you fixed in this thread:

    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/181484/focus=181485

I think this path normalization is another instance of us knowing a bit too much of "git" even when we are told with "--no-index" that we are not operating on a working tree associated with git.

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 19:00, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Thats why I'm completely rattled after trying an absolute path with --no-index and it didn't worked.

So we agree that this is a bug. Good. I will try to have a look into this.

Bert