setup: suppress implicit "." work-tree for bare repos

If an explicit GIT_DIR is given without a working tree, we
implicitly assume that the current working directory should
be used as the working tree. E.g.,:

  GIT_DIR=/some/repo.git git status

would compare against the cwd.

Unfortunately, we fool this rule for sub-invocations of git
by setting GIT_DIR internally ourselves. For example:

  git init foo
  cd foo/.git
  git status ;# fails, as we expect
  git config alias.st status
  git status ;# does not fail, but should

What happens is that we run setup_git_directory when doing
alias lookup (since we need to see the config), set GIT_DIR
as a result, and then leave GIT_WORK_TREE blank (because we
do not have one). Then when we actually run the status
command, we do setup_git_directory again, which sees our
explicit GIT_DIR and uses the cwd as an implicit worktree.

It's tempting to argue that we should be suppressing that
second invocation of setup_git_directory, as it could use
the values we already found in memory. However, the problem
still exists for sub-processes (e.g., if "git status" were
an external command).

You can see another example with the "--bare" option, which
sets GIT_DIR explicitly. For example:

  git init foo
  cd foo/.git
  git status ;# fails
  git --bare status ;# does NOT fail

We need some way of telling sub-processes "even though
GIT_DIR is set, do not use cwd as an implicit working tree".
We could do it by putting a special token into
GIT_WORK_TREE, but the obvious choice (an empty string) has
some portability problems.

Instead, we add a new boolean variable, GIT_IMPLICIT_WORK_TREE,
which suppresses the use of cwd as a working tree when
GIT_DIR is set. We trigger the new variable when we know we
are in a bare setting.

The variable is left intentionally undocumented, as this is
an internal detail (for now, anyway). If somebody comes up
with a good alternate use for it, and once we are confident
we have shaken any bugs out of it, we can consider promoting
it further.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 12 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/cache.h b/cache.h
index 3c6b677418..c1fe67ffcf 100644
--- a/cache.h
+++ b/cache.h
@@ -366,6 +366,18 @@ static inline enum object_type object_type(unsigned int mode)
 #define GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_MODE_ENVIRONMENT "GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_MODE"
 
 /*
+ * This environment variable is expected to contain a boolean indicating
+ * whether we should or should not treat:
+ *
+ *   GIT_DIR=foo.git git ...
+ *
+ * as if GIT_WORK_TREE=. was given. It's not expected that users will make use
+ * of this, but we use it internally to communicate to sub-processes that we
+ * are in a bare repo. If not set, defaults to true.
+ */
+#define GIT_IMPLICIT_WORK_TREE_ENVIRONMENT "GIT_IMPLICIT_WORK_TREE"
+
+/*
  * Repository-local GIT_* environment variables; these will be cleared
  * when git spawns a sub-process that runs inside another repository.
  * The array is NULL-terminated, which makes it easy to pass in the "env"