Why does git break if '/' is the root of the repository?

Question

We'd like to use git to maintain system configurations. Because sometimes configuration data exists outside of /etc, we've started doing something like this on our systems:

  # cd /
  # git init
  # git add etc
  # git add some/other/path
  # git commit -m 'initial import'

And so forth. This works, up to a point. As long as your cwd == '/', git behaves normally. However, if you try, for example, to run git from inside a subdirectory:

cd /etc
git status

You get garbage. In our case, thousands of lines of "deleted:" listings for files that clearly still exist. This behavior appears to be exclusive to running git in /; doing the same thing anywhere else works just fine.

I can "fix" the behavior like this:

GIT_WORK_TREE=/ git status

And hey, everything works the way Linus intended...but this is a pain. I don't want to set it in the environment unilaterally (because this would conflict with the use of git in other repositories), and I'd like to avoid a wrapper script. Do I have any other options?

Answer 1

This is a complete guess that you could use to investigate further, but I suspect that git's "find the .git directory" behavior is interacting with the fact that / is its own parent directory. Maybe the "stop at the root" logic has a fencepost-type error.