On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 02:23:17PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

$ git clone --recursive git@github.com:git/git.git
OBSERVE B: The clone succeeds

This may be an unexpected but is an understandable behaviour.

First the command has to create an empty repository with an initial
configuration file, and at that point [includeif "gitdir:*"] match
would notice that there is a gitdir at $(pwd)/.git; by the time the
command actually starts talking to the other side, the repository
specific configuration can be picked up.

I think this is not just unexpected, but something we've explicitly
tried to make work. After creating the repository, we re-read the config
in order to pick up any "clone -c" options. I'm not sure if anybody
thought about how includeIf would interact here, but I think it is quite
logical to say "now that we are in a repository, these config options
that are conditional on being in a particular repository will take
effect". I.e., expecting it not to work is making assumptions about
the timing of when Git locks in the value of config options.

And you are outside any repository, so there shouldn't be any gitdir
in effect to influence [includeif "gitdir:*"] matching.

Another option, as Peff suggested in the old thread, would be to
introduce a separate [includeif "cwd:*"] match, but I do not know
how well it would fly.  with that, you may be able to

	[includeif "cwd:/home/stuart/work/*"]
		path = ...

I think that may be cleaner than the "pretend we have already a
git-dir here" hack I mentioned earlier, but I didn't think things
through.

Perhaps. I have no objection to adding an option like that. But I don't
think it solves the fundamental issue in this bug report, which is
asking "what will the config look like in a repository that I created at
this path via git-init or git-clone?".

Maybe Stuart really would prefer to change his config to "whenever I am
in this directory root, repo or no, use this config". It does have weird
corner cases around "git --git-dir=/path/to/repo", but doing that from
another directory is perhaps rare enough that people using a cwd:
conditional would be happy to ignore that.

But if we do want to solve it, then your --pretend-git-dir is doing that
directly. I don't think it's terribly useful in general, but it could be
a debugging aid.

-Peff