Re: [PATCH] Teach 'git apply' to look at $GIT_DIR/config

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

And I use git-apply to apply patches way more often than "patch" these 
days. And I _think_ that it is a feature that it does not cd-up before 
trying to apply the stuff. In git.git, I cannot think of a reasonable use 
case for applying something not relative-to-root, but I had that use case 
in some other (git-tracked) project.

So my vote is to leave the cwd where it is in git-apply.

I strongly disagree from my recent day-job experience.  I was
feeding some changes to my co-worker's repository from my
uncommitted changes (because it was incomplete but the part
needed to unstuck him was ready).  The day job project is much
deeper than git.git, and the changes were to two files in a
directory somewhat deep.

So I went there and said "git apply --index P.diff", which
applied cleanly.  But the other "git apply --index Q.diff"
didn't.

So naturally I said:

	$ git apply --reject Q.diff
        error: filfre/frotz/nitfol.c: No such file or directory

I ended up editing filfre/frotz/ out of Q.diff in his editor.
Explaining why P.diff and Q.diff, both of which were about the
files in the same dirrectly, behaved differently was not pretty
to git uninitiated.

Leaving --index case and working-tree-only case inconsistent is
bad.  We really should fix it (I really wish I found it out
before 1.5.0 went out).

Hi,

On Sat, 17 Feb 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

And I use git-apply to apply patches way more often than "patch" these 
days. And I _think_ that it is a feature that it does not cd-up before 
trying to apply the stuff. In git.git, I cannot think of a reasonable use 
case for applying something not relative-to-root, but I had that use case 
in some other (git-tracked) project.

So my vote is to leave the cwd where it is in git-apply.

I strongly disagree from my recent day-job experience. [Explains a 
convincing use case in favour of cd-up.]

Hmm. I have to think about that. But a consequence of what you suggest 
would be to disallow git-apply outside of a repository, because then you 
would introduce _another_ inconsistency (git-apply without --index would 
behave differently when inside a repo than when outside of one).

Ciao,
Dscho