On 11/20/23 00:24, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Adam Majer [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

In a garbage collected bare git repository, the refs/ subdirectory is
empty.  In use-cases when such a repository is directly added into
another repository, it no longer is detected as valid.

Josh & Glen [*], isn't this a layout that we  explicitly discourage and
eventually plan to forbid anyway?

*1* who worked on e35f202b (setup: trace bare repository setups, 2023-05-01)

This is fair enough. Completely removing embedded git repos would cause 
some pain in test suites as it was discussed in the thread for that 
commit[1]. Gitea (for example) has a few dozen embedded bare 
repositories for tests.

In either case, running `git gc` on a bare repository makes it no longer 
detectable as a git repository after checkout, GIT_DIR or not. This 
seems to be unintentional and not linked to the other discussion.

- Adam