Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/4] git --paginate: do not commit pager choice too early

From: Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 05:13:35 -0500

Jeff King wrote:

> But reading the message for patch 4/4, I can't help but wonder if the
> right way forward is for the git wrapper to _always_ find the repository
> as the very first thing.
[...]
> the worst case should be a little bit of
> wasted effort.

This is a very useful thought.  Git without the chdir() to toplevel
would be pleasanter, I think.  (Yes, I realize you weren’t necessarily
suggesting suppressing a chdir_to_toplevel() in place of
setup_git_repository() and friends.)

Regarding the repository search: automounters can cause pain if
DISCOVERY_ACROSS_FILESYSTEM is set and GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES is not
set appropriately.  An important script that does

  tmpdir=$(mktemp -d)
  cd "$tmpdir"
  ...

  git diff --no-index a b
  ...

could hang indefinitely if some nut has created a named pipe at
/tmp/.git.  I haven’t come up with any non far-fetched reason to mind
the repository search, though.

Will think about this.