Home directory incorrectly detected as Bazel project when ~/workspace directory exists on macOS

[tofuya]

Expected behavior

Projectile should not treat the home directory as a Bazel project when only a ~/workspace directory exists (and no WORKSPACE file).

Actual behavior

Projectile incorrectly recognizes the home directory (/Users/foo/) as a Bazel project even though there is no WORKSPACE file directly under $HOME.
When a directory named ~/workspace exists, running M-x projectile-project-info shows:

Project dir: /Users/foo/
Project VCS: none
Project type: bazel

If I rename ~/workspace to something else (e.g. ~/workspaces), then $HOME is no longer treated as a project.

This seems to be a side effect of macOS’s case-insensitive filesystem, which makes workspace and WORKSPACE indistinguishable in certain checks.
It causes Projectile to falsely identify $HOME as a Bazel project, even though no marker file exists.

As a result, Projectile treats the entire home directory as a project, leading to severe performance degradation in downstream environments (e.g. Spacemacs, pet-mode) when opening files under $HOME.

Steps to reproduce the problem

1. On macOS, create a directory named ~/workspace
2. Start Emacs with Projectile enabled
3. Execute M-x projectile-project-info
4. Observe that the home directory is recognized as a Bazel project
5. Rename ~/workspace → ~/workspaces and see that the issue disappears

Additional notes

This issue causes significant performance problems downstream (see syl20bnr/spacemacs#17142 and related reports).
In my case, simply opening a Python file under $HOME can take several minutes if Projectile misidentifies $HOME as a project.

Environment & Version information

Projectile version

Projectile version: 20250704.908

Emacs version

GNU Emacs 30.1

Operating system

macOS 13.7.8.1

Related issues

• projectile should not add my home directory to known project list #1577
• [Bug] Python files in home directories open extremely slowly syl20bnr/spacemacs#17142

[github-actions]

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