Re: [DONOTAPPLY PATCH 2/3] setup: warn about implicit worktree with $GIT_DIR

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 01:21:42PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

> Jeff King wrote:
> 
> > --- a/setup.c
> > +++ b/setup.c
> > @@ -437,6 +437,23 @@ const char *read_gitfile(const char *path)
> >  	return path;
> >  }
> >  
> > +static const char warn_implicit_work_tree_msg[] =
> > +N_("You have set GIT_DIR (or used --git-dir) without specifying\n"
> > +   "a working tree. In Git 2.0, the behavior will change
> 
> Please no.  I don't want git 2.0 to be delayed forever.

Please replace "2.0" with some future version, then. I just made up the
number. But...

> If we want this warning, would something like the following do?
> 
> 	warning: You have set GIT_DIR without setting GIT_WORK_TREE
> 	hint: In this case, GIT_WORK_TREE defaults to '.'
> 	hint: To suppress this message, set GIT_WORK_TREE='.'

That can help by teaching people how GIT_DIR behaves in general. But the
warning and hint will be small consolation to somebody who runs
"GIT_DIR=foo.git git clean -f" and sees it for the first time.

If you want to argue that people would see the warning in earlier runs
of git, I can kind of buy that. Although the incident that triggered
this discussion probably wouldn't have (I would usually start a
git-clean session with "git clean" without "-f" or "git status", either
of which would have done equally well as this warning to notify the user
what was going on).

Like I said earlier, though, I'm not really sure this is the direction
we want to go. This series is more about seeing what the fallouts are. I
probably shouldn't have included this middle patch at all, because the
interesting thing is what happens when we do turn it off.

-Peff