> > Or instead we could accelerate the long term plan of removing a > > hard coded the_repository and have each cmd builtin take an additional > > repository pointer from the init code, such that we'd bring all of Git to > > work on arbitrary repositories. Then the standard test suite should be > > okay, as there is no special case for the_repository any more. > > Demo'd in this RFC series for git-merge-base. > > The core idea is found in patch 1, > and the proof of concept is found in patch 2. I don't think working around the_repository is sufficient, as there are other ways to access the same repository state (the_index, directly accessing files through file I/O). Instead I would prefer a test like in t/test-repository.c - each patch set would probably only need one test for the last function converted, since typically the last function uses every other function converted. Also, even if we decided that working around the_repository is sufficient, I don't think this get_the_repository() is a good approach. If (or when) we decide to convert all builtins to not use the_repository, we would have to clean up all such calls. Better would be to pass the_repository from the invoker of the cmd builtin, and reuse NO_THE_REPOSITORY_COMPATIBILITY_MACROS in the builtin. (I haven't thought much about how to transition to this, but one way might be to extend "struct cmd_struct" in git.c to also have a new-style function pointer, and #define GIT_CMD(c, f, o) {c, NULL, o, f} or something like that.) This doesn't directly address the fact that the builtin might call lib code that indirectly references the_repository, but I think that this won't be an issue because by the time we're ready to convert builtins to not use the_repository, most if not all of the lib code would have NO_THE_REPOSITORY_COMPATIBILITY_MACROS defined anyway.