Re: [PATCH 0/8] Make C-level operable from subdirectories

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

On Fri, 25 Nov 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

I once advocated for an environment to name the top of working
tree directory --- it might make sense to resurrect that one.

Please don't. 

We should just make the scripts do it automatically instead.

Here comes an 8-patch series.

  [PATCH 1/8] git-apply: work from subdirectory.
  [PATCH 2/8] peek-remote: honor proxy config even from subdirectory.
  [PATCH 3/8] fsck-objects: work from subdirectory.
  [PATCH 4/8] checkout-index: work from subdirectory.
  [PATCH 5/8] hash-object: work within subdirectory.
  [PATCH 6/8] ls-tree: work from subdirectory.
  [PATCH 7/8] Make networking commands to work from a subdirectory.
  [PATCH 8/8] Make the rest of commands work from a subdirectory.

In case it was not obvious,...

I think your GIT_DIR=`git-rev-parse --git-dir` patch would make
things work better on top of these changes, while making many of
them silently do funny things as you warned.

For example, among the ones I mentioned in my previous message:

 - git-checkout with or without -b to switch branches work.
   This is because "git-read-tree -u" is not constrained by the
   current directory and operates on the whole working tree.

 - git-checkout <ent> <path>... works as expected.  It takes cwd
   relative paths and updates the index and working tree for
   only specified paths from the named ent.

 - git-checkout -f works in a confusing way; only the files
   under the current directory is updated.  This is because
   "git-checkout-index -a" behaves that way.  git-checkout -f to
   revert to the current HEAD is probably good to work this way,
   but doing this while switching branches is too confusing.

 - git-reset --hard also works in a funny way.  It leaves paths
   outside the current directory intact, because ls-tree reports
   only the files in the current directory while ls-files
   reports all.

 - git-prune works.  git-tag works as before.

It could be argued that it was a mistake that [PATCH 4/8] and
[PATCH 6/8] changed checkout-index and ls-tree to limit their
scope to the current directory, but that is consistent with what
rev-list (log and whatchanged) and diff do, and might be
debatably useful.  Which suggests that things like git-checkout
and git-reset whose normal mode of operation should be
whole-tree should chdir up and do the path prefixing to convert
original cwd relative paths to repository relative.