Re: regression: "96b9e0e3 config: treat user and xdg config permission problems as errors" busted git-daemon

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 11, 2013, 18:14 UTC
Message-ID: <20130411181439.GA2820@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20130411181103.GJ27070@google.com>

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 11:11:03AM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> > -- >8 --
> > Subject: [PATCH] daemon: set HOME when we switch to --user
> 
> Thanks for taking care of it.  For what it's worth,
> 
> Acked-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
> 
> I'm not sure whether to keep 96b9e0e (config: treat user and xdg
> config permission problem as errors) in the long run, BTW.  There have
> been multiple reports about dropping privileges and not being able to
> access the old HOME, and I'm not convinced any more that the
> predictability is worth the breakage for such people.  Though checking
> if $HOME is inaccessible and treating that case specially would be
> even worse...
> 
> Insights welcome.

I could go either way. I think 96b9e0e is the right thing to do conceptually, but I kind of doubt it was affecting all that many people. And though it's _possible_ for it to be a security problem, I find it much more likely that the site admin tries to set some config, gets annoyed when it doesn't work, and debugs it. So from a practical perspective, 96b9e0e may be doing more harm than good, even though it's the right thing.

-Peff