Hi It turns out Git treats the directory '.git' differently enough from everything else. That may be ok, but here's one place where I encountered an unpleasant (and imho unexpected) behaviour: if you supply a different repository base name, say, '.git_new', by either setting GIT_DIR or using the '--git-dir' option, Git 'add' will not make any exception for it and think of it as a new (weird) directory. In particular, 'git add -A' with a consequent commit will add this repository into itself with all its guts. Now I know, the '--git-dir' option may usually be meant to use when the repository is somewhere outside of the work tree, and such a problem would not arise. And even if it is inside, sure enough, you can add this '.git_new' to the ignores or excludes. But is this really what you expect? I come forward to offer my own will to fix this behaviour (which is rooted in 'dir.c'). However there are uncertainties, and I'm asking for an opinion. Apparently, the assumption that the repository is in '.git' has propagated far enough. In particular, every '.git' within the working tree seems to be ignored for the purpose of staging. Is this a consistent behaviour? And, perhaps there are a million more places where the name '.git' is hard-coded, and it might be reasonable to question the legitimacy for that. Or, in contrast, to what degree or depth (in the source code) does one *expect* Git to rename all its hard-coded '.git's into '.gut's when a "GIT_DIR=.gut" is supplied? cheers Pavel -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html