support bare/mirrored checkouts

[jessefarinacci]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
lazygit refuses to launch in a bare (git clone --mirror https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit) git repository with message "Error: must be run inside a git repository"

Describe the solution you'd like
It'd be super nice if lazygit could present its useful set of TUI dialogs when inside a bare/mirrored repository.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Other programs work fine inside this type of, admittedly uncommon, type of checkout. git of course works, but alternative tools like tig work also.

Additional context
N/A

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Thanks for such a great tool! :)

[stefanhaller]

I suppose this might be possible, but it's a lot of work. We'd have to audit all the code to see which commands need to be disabled in a bare repo (anything that's somehow related to the working tree). We should probably even hide the Files panel, as it serves no purpose in a bare repo. My feeling is that there wouldn't be much left. 😄

Out of curiosity, what's the use case? From a recent discussion with @jesseduffield:

From what I've seen, anybody interacting with a bare repo with lazygit is typically using a worktree somewhere. E.g. with dotfiles (#1201) or when adding individual worktrees (#3100). Bare repos without worktrees are typically just remotes, and most remotes are managed by github, gitlab, etc.

Are you really working with a bare repo that doesn't have a work tree attached somehow? Why?

[jessefarinacci]

Well, lazygit is just my git tool of choice.. :) perhaps that is an inappropriate understanding or expectation by me.

The use case is just critical supply chain protection. I mirror locally a couple of critical repositories from various public hosting providers, I then add a private remote to a service I pay for, then push any changes in the upstream project to my private remote. Perhaps this is too revealing of my data hoarding, but I then have a locally available full mirror, and the confidence of a regular remote in official upstream and my private provider.

During a quick inspection of the status of that procedure, I just peeked into one of the local bare mirrors and fired up my new favorite SCM tool :) then I hit the error. I was hoping at least some information could be presented.. for example, tig just fires up fine and starts showing me the commit history. It's a quick way to get a tiny bit of confidence that the checkout succeeded, a basic smoke test.

I understand if this feature request is out of scope, no problem. Thanks for a truly useful tool :)

[stefanhaller]

I see, thanks for explaining. I have to say that I don't find the effort justified for this use case ("tiny bit of confidence, basic smoke test"); a git log --oneline on the command line should suffice for that.

I'm not just talking about the effort of making the change, but also about the maintenance burden afterwards. All those extra if statements do add complexity to the code, and there's this new scenario against which we need to test every new feature we add in the future.

[jesseduffield]

As much as it pains me to disappoint somebody who shares my first name, I agree with @stefanhaller . We would only want to do this if there was a huge demand for it, which it seems there is not.