From: Riku Voipio Date: Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:19:44 GMT Subject: bug: git-http-push fails to validate email address in LOCK request Message-ID: <20090409111944.GA22297@kos.to> Hi, If for whatever case EMAIL env variable or gitconfig email= setting contains any special xml character <>%&, the lock request in push will fail, with a completly useless error message: git push foo upstream-push:master Error: cannot lock existing info/refs error: failed to push some refs to 'https://git.foo.org/projects/foo' using the undocumented GIT_CURL_VERBOSE=1 env variable: -snip- > LOCK /projects/foo/info/refs HTTP/1.1 Authorization: Basic nothisstringisnottheonefromthereallog User-Agent: git/1.6.2.1 Host: git.foo.org Accept: */* Timeout: Second-600 Content-Type: text/xml Content-Length: 225 Expect: 100-continue < HTTP/1.1 100 Continue * The requested URL returned error: 400 * Closing connection #0 Error: cannot lock existing info/refs error: failed to push some refs to 'https://git.foo.org/projects/foo' -snip- Helpfully, the actual lock request is omitted. After finding someone from git hoster to grep the logs: [Tue Apr 07 14:13:24 2009] [error] [client 1.1.1.1] XML Parser Error: XML parser error code: not well-formed (invalid token) (4) from http-push.c, we see that the lock request is: #define LOCK_REQUEST "\n\n\n\n\nmailto:%s\n\n" So there is exactly one variable being set. Turns out the email address in .gitconfig was set to ''. Yes, a user error. This was copied from $EMAIL env variable, where using strings such as 'foo bar ' have been a norm forever. -- "rm -rf" only sounds scary if you don't have backups