On Sat, Jan 26, 2019 at 03:07:54PM +0100, Sebastian Staudt wrote: > Are you sure that it will fail without a working tree? > Is it even possible to have *no* working tree? > > I already tested this with some real life examples, e.g. > > git --git-dir /some/path/.git describe > > From inside and outside of other repositories. > I didn‘t hit any errors so far. Try: git clone --bare . bare.git cd bare.git git describe That works with current versions of Git, but yields "fatal: this operation must be run in a work tree" with your patch. -Peff PS Your patches seem whitespace-damaged. You might want to look into using git-send-email.