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

From: W. Trevor King <wking@tremily.us>
Date: Apr 12, 2013, 00:57 UTC
Message-ID: <20130412005748.GA17116@odin.tremily.us>
In-Reply-To: <20130411222301.GA11283@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 06:23:01PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

Show 22 quoted lines

> On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 03:20:46PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > "W. Trevor King" <wking@tremily.us> writes:
> > > The difficulty was figuring out why the daemon was dying in
> > > the first place (which involved bisection for me as well).  Maybe
> > > there could be an additional note about HOME to flesh out:
> > >
> > >   fatal: unable to access '/root/.config/git/config': Permission denied
> > >
> > > when there's an EACCES error for the per-user config?
> > 
> > Doesn't access_or_die() say
> > 
> >     die_errno(_("unable to access '%s'"), path);
> > 
> > already?  I am puzzled...
> 
> I think the point is that it could add
> 
>   ...and I was looking in /root, because that is where your HOME points.
>   Shouldn't you be able to read your own HOME directory?
> 
> which should make it painfully obvious to the user what is going on.

That's more or less what I had in mind. The 1.8.1.1 release notes just say:

 * When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and
   finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error
   message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does
   not exist there" and moving on.

without saying anything about permission problems becoming errors, or noting that oddball HOME configurations might cause problems. Since the release notes are already out, a notice like this should probably go somewhere else. However, this is a lot of hand holding to be printed along side the error message… Since git-daemon (or gitweb) is the most likely place for this problem to crop up, maybe a note in its (their) man pages would be a good idea? This thread may also be sufficient documentation, assuming good enough search engines ;).

Cheers, Trevor

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