Re: "make quick-install-man" broke recently

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

> Grr. Now 'check_path()' is no longer something generically useful.
>
> Could you perhaps instead only change 'checkout_entry()' to do this hack, 
> and leave 'check_path()' as a generic replacement for "lstat()" that 
> doesn't follow symlinks?

Given that non-empty base_dir is only used for "checkout-index --prefix",
iow, the "path" internally used by git and fed to our symlink.c cache are
supposed to be always relative to the work tree, I think that may be a
good thing to do in the short-term.

But only if we won't add any more like "checkout-index --prefix".  If you
want to implement "git checkout --prefix=over-there/" and if you want to
call check_path() directly (iow not as a part of callchain from
checkout_entry()) while doing so, for example, you would regret keeping
the check_path() function unaware of base_dir, as you would reintroduce
the same bug.

I thought about getting rid of base_dir from struct checkout by running
create_directories() in checkout-index and chdir(2) there, because this is
a very special case codepath anyway.  I actually haven't tried it, but it
probably will have bad interactions with the way we find $GIT_DIR.