Re: [PATCH] Make git log work for git CWD outside of work tree

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 06:13:49PM +0700, Duy Nguyen wrote:

> > Can't we model this after how setup_git_directory_gently() gives the
> > subcommands a choice?  While the majority of subcommands do not call
> > the _gently() variant and die when we are not in a repository, the
> > rest do use it and continue after learning that they are outside a
> > repository.
> 
> It may work, but we need to be careful because paths as command line
> arguments will not be relative to cwd anymore. If some code assumes
> cwd unchanged, they're in trouble. I guess they're in trouble either
> way because of the "sometimes chdir, sometimes not" current behavior.

Exactly. The code itself must respect "prefix", and if it doesn't, it's
broken. So I don't think a code switch makes any sense here. It's not
the code which needs to care, it's the user who might be relying on the
externally visible behavior.

I can't think of a case where the existing behavior actually makes sense
for the user, though. They've provided a $GIT_WORK_TREE, but somehow
want their out-of-worktree relative paths to still work? What are they
using the paths for? Surely:

  cd /out-of-tree
  echo content >foo
  GIT_DIR=/repo/.git GIT_WORK_TREE=/repo git add foo

shouldn't work?

Likewise reading .mailmap and .gitattributes from /out-of-tree is simply
a bug.

I dunno. Maybe I am missing some subtle case, but it's not clear to me
what the user would be trying to do by having git stay in the original
directory.

-Peff