Re: Permission denied on home dir results in fatal error as of 1.8.1.1

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 9, 2013, 01:05 UTC
Message-ID: <20130209010534.GC8461@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v6222xqc4.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Nick Muerdter <stuff@nickm.org> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

>> As of git 1.8.1.1 and above (tested up to 1.8.1.3), if the home
>> directory can't be accessed, it results in a fatal error. In git 1.8.1
>> and below this same setup just resulted in warnings. Was this an
>> intentional change?
>
> I think this was done to not just help diagnosing misconfiguration,
> but to prevent an unintended misconfiguration from causing problems
> (e.g. the user thinks user.name is set up correctly, but forbids Git
> from reading it from the configuration files, and ends up creating
> commits under wrong names).

Yes, that's right. Sometimes ignoring settings has bad consequences, so git errors out to let the user intervene and decide whether the inaccessible settings are important.

Thanks, Jonathan