Re: [RFC/PATCH 1/2] improve missing repository error message

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 4, 2009, 10:35 UTC
Message-ID: <20090304103556.GB16123@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <vpqtz69lk6a.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>

On Wed, Mar 04, 2009 at 10:19:25AM +0100, Matthieu Moy wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> > +		die("'%s' does not appear to be a git repository", dir);
> 
> It may be sensible to distinguish the case where dir exists as a
> directory but isn't a repository, and the case where it does not exist
> at all, like "directory exists but does not appear to be a git
> repository" Vs "no such directory".
> 
> Just in case someone does a "mkdir" on the server and doesn't know he
> has to "git init" there too.

I agree it would be nice to be more descriptive; however, it's not quite as simple as checking if the chdir failed. For "non-strict" repo lookup, we check a number of variants. For $foo, we check:

  $foo.git/.git
  $foo/.git
  $foo.git
  $foo

If $foo exists but isn't a git directory, but $foo/.git does not exist, then what is the correct response? I guess we can say "no such directory" only if $foo and $foo.git don't exist, and "not a git repository" for the others.

I also don't know if we care about information leakage; with such a patch can I now start probing the existence of arbitrary directories via git-daemon (I haven't checked to see if there are other path restrictions in place)?

-Peff