git-sh-setup: Fix scripts whose PWD is a symlink into a git work-dir

I want directories of my working tree to be linked to from various
paths on my filesystem where third-party components expect them, both
in development and production environments.  A build system's install
step could solve this, but I develop scripts and web pages that don't
need to be built.  Git's submodule system could solve this, but we
tend to develop, branch, and test those directories all in unison, so
one big repository feels more natural.  We prefer to edit and commit
on the symlinked paths, not the canonical ones, and in that setting,
"git pull" fails to find the top-level directory of the repository
while other commands work fine.

"git pull" fails because POSIX shells have a notion of current working
directory that is different from getcwd().  The shell stores this path
in PWD.  As a result, "cd ../" can be interpreted differently in a
shell script than chdir("../") in a C program.  The shell interprets
"../" by essentially stripping the last textual path component from
PWD, whereas C chdir() follows the ".." link in the current directory
on the filesystem.  When PWD is a symlink, these are different
destinations.  As a result, Git's C commands find the correct
top-level working tree, and shell scripts do not.

Changes:

* When interpreting a relative upward (../) path in cd_to_toplevel,
  prepend the cwd without symlinks, given by /bin/pwd
* Add tests for cd_to_toplevel and "git pull" in a symlinked
  directory that failed before this fix, plus contrasting scenarios
  that already worked

Signed-off-by: Marcel M. Cary <marcel@oak.homeunix.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 21 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/git-sh-setup.sh b/git-sh-setup.sh
index dbdf209ec..f07d96b9b 100755
--- a/git-sh-setup.sh
+++ b/git-sh-setup.sh
@@ -85,8 +85,27 @@ cd_to_toplevel () {
 	cdup=$(git rev-parse --show-cdup)
 	if test ! -z "$cdup"
 	then
-		cd "$cdup" || {
-			echo >&2 "Cannot chdir to $cdup, the toplevel of the working tree"
+		case "$cdup" in
+		/*)
+			# Not quite the same as if we did "cd -P '$cdup'" when
+			# $cdup contains ".." after symlink path components.
+			# Don't fix that case at least until Git switches to
+			# "cd -P" across the board.
+			phys="$cdup"
+			;;
+		..|../*|*/..|*/../*)
+			# Interpret $cdup relative to the physical, not logical, cwd.
+			# Probably /bin/pwd is more portable than passing -P to cd or pwd.
+			phys="$(/bin/pwd)/$cdup"
+			;;
+		*)
+			# There's no "..", so no need to make things absolute.
+			phys="$cdup"
+			;;
+		esac
+
+		cd "$phys" || {
+			echo >&2 "Cannot chdir to $phys, the toplevel of the working tree"
 			exit 1
 		}
 	fi