/* compiler workaround */ - what was the issue?

Duy,

In 
https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/commit/b3c96fb158f05152336f167076f5d81d23c3a5e5
(split-index: strip pathname of on-disk replaced entries, 13 Jun 2014) 
Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy [off-list ref]  you have

read-cache.c#L1790 (in that commit, now ~L1873)

    int saved_namelen = saved_namelen; /* compiler workaround */

Which then becomes an MSVC compile warning C4700: uninitialized local 
variable.

I'm wondering what was the compiler workaround being referred to? i.e. why 
does it need that tweak? There's no mention of the reason in the commit 
message.

There are a few other occurences of this same initialisation issue, so I was 
wondering if it's still neded? Or should I just get MSVC to ignore it, which 
may hide other issues..

--
Philip