Re: I've noticed the command `git --git-dir=<path> shortlog`

On Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 9:28 AM Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

It's possible somebody is relying on this in order to read ".mailmap" in
a bare repository, but it seems rather unlikely. And the documentation
says "If the file .mailmap exists at the toplevel of the repository",
which I think pretty clearly means the top of the working tree.

There was a time, before the change was made to have bare repositories
read the HEAD:.mailmap blob if one exists, when Bitbucket Server
relied on this in order to have mailmapping. We'd unpack the
`HEAD:.mailmap` blob to `.mailmap` in the bare repository whenever it
changed. Now that it's automatically read out of the repository,
though, that manual unpacking code was removed.

(Not disagreeing with your "seems rather unlikely", by the way. With
the blob reading behavior I think it's probably true.)

Bryan