Making git apply always work relative to current directory

I have a piece of software which must run out of a given directory. In development, this is a git repository, and in production it is not. I also have an ignored subdirectory where I would like to use git apply to apply patches (in both environments).

If I run git apply --no-index --verbose <patch>, it succeeds in both cases, but when I'm in the git repository, it *silently does nothing*. I have to provide a --directory argument in order for it to function underneath the repository, but of course that doesn't work when the directory isn't within a repository. --unsafe-paths did not seem to make a difference. I'm using Git 2.7.2.

Is there a way to tell git apply that it should apply relative to the current working directory, no matter what? I'm happy to send a patch to either the documentation or git apply if necessary.

"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:

That originally sounded peculiar to me and I suspected it to be a bug, but it looks like a designed-in feature and with us since

commit edf2e37002eeb30a2ccad5db3b3e1fe41cdc7eb0
Author: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date:   Fri Nov 25 23:14:15 2005 -0800

    git-apply: work from subdirectory.
    
    When applying a patch to index file, we need to know where GIT_DIR is;
    use setup_git_directory() to find it out.  This also allows us to work
    from a subdirectory if we wanted to.
    
    When git-apply is run from a subdirectory, it applies the given patch
    only to the files under the current directory and below.
    
    Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>

So exclusion by use_patch() for paths outside the current directory seems to be a feature; the log message does not say "why", but if I have to guess, the reasoning was probably "The old world order was that the command has to always be run from the top level. A user who wants to run it from a subdirectory must be doing so for a reason, e.g. 'I am currently working in this directory, do not touch outside this area'". In any case, I suspect that the existing tooling people built over the past 10 years around "git apply" already depends on this behaviour, so we cannot lightly change it.

Is it so hard to temporarily go up to the root, run "git apply", and come back? You can use "--no-index --directory=trash" for both cases that way.

On Sat, Mar 05, 2016 at 11:31:53AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

I was planning to add a --here option (maybe spelled --current-directory) that would change that behavior, since I figured that people would be relying on the current behavior. The man page clearly indicates that some people are using it as a better GNU patch, so an option that does that might be useful.

Regardless, I'd say that --verbose should cause git apply to say something. I'm not a newbie with Git, and I spent about an hour trying to figure this out. I've also been bitten by it before elsewhere.

The existing code used patch until we realized that older versions of GNU patch can't apply certain git diffs. It's not super easy to change it, but I suppose we could.