When the working tree contains a repository with no commits, it's treated as an empty directory, not a repository: $ git init $ git init no-commit && touch no-commit/untracked $ git init with-commit && touch with-commit/untracked $ git -C with-commit commit --allow-empty -mmsg $ git ls-files -o no-commit/untracked with-commit/ That's admittedly a weird case that is unlikely to happen in the wild, and indeed I didn't observe it in the wild. In DataLad, we rely on `ls-files -o` to stop at the boundary of a submodule (like it does with "with-commit" above), and we noticed the "repository with no commit" exception on a minimal snippet that was meant for debugging another issue [*]. This series makes the "is repository?" check in treat_directory() use is_nonbare_repository_dir() instead of resolve_gitlink_ref() so that a repository without any commits is treated like a repository rather than an empty directory. This makes the reporting from commands like ls-files consistent for the case shown above, and it also avoids the case where 'git add no-commit' (no trailing slash) adds the untracked files of the no-commit/ repository to the index of the current repository. [*]: https://github.com/datalad/datalad/issues/3139#issuecomment-460542647 Kyle Meyer (4): submodule: refuse to add repository with no commits t3000: move non-submodule repo test to separate file t3009: test that ls-files -o traverses bogus repo dir: do not traverse repositories with no commits dir.c | 6 ++- git-submodule.sh | 12 +++++- t/t3000-ls-files-others.sh | 7 ---- t/t3009-ls-files-others-nonsubmodule.sh | 56 +++++++++++++++++++++++++ t/t3700-add.sh | 1 + t/t7400-submodule-basic.sh | 11 ++++- 6 files changed, 81 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-) create mode 100755 t/t3009-ls-files-others-nonsubmodule.sh -- 2.21.0