Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] recursive support for ls-files

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2016 11:17:49 -0700

Brandon Williams <[email-masked]> writes:

> In a previous email you mentioned that this feature should be completely
> hidden from users, which is why I removed the command line option for
> this latest series.

I may have said something like that; I do not recall, though, so a
more accurate description might be "I may have said something that
can be (mis)interpreted like so".  Sorry for the confusion.

In any case, an environment is not "completely hidden from users",
so it is not fundamentallly different from a command line option
anyway ;-)

> If that isn't what you intended that I can
> definitely add the option to git.c.  And you would rather we perform the
> checking in git.c to see if a subcommand supports the prefix versus
> silently ignoring it if it hasn't?  I'm assuming this checking would
> also be done in git.c?

I actually do not care strongly _where_ the check happens.  It was
just that in the subcommand dispatcher would be the single place
that is easiest-to-implement to perform that check, that made me
suggest that.  We already have various bits like NEEDS_WORK_TREE,
RUN_SETUP, etc. so REJECT_EXTERNAL_PREFIX (or whatever its name be;
I do not offhand recall current proposal) bit would fit there
naturally, I would think.  Of course, non-built-in commands need to
protect themselves separately, if they want to.