Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:

> On 06/14/2016 08:03 PM, Phillip Lord wrote:
>
>>> AFAIK Emacs doesn't support GIT_DIR, see eg https://debbugs.gnu.org/5344 .
>
>> There's a patch attached that Bug report which never seems to have been
>> applied.
>
> Have you tried it? Does it fix your problem?


The following patch addresses this bug.

John/Eli would you want this for Emacs-25.


I've noticed from instrumenting vc-git that it's not just the
symbolic-ref command that returns 128, but several others. So, it might
be that the best long term solution would be to make change vc-git--call
to set the default directory to the root, which would make GIT_DIR=.git
always correct.

At the moment, though, I've noticed some git commands are called with
simple file names, and some full, so this would probably require more
changes. No sense in making this sort of change for Emacs-25 now.