Re: What's cooking in git.git (Apr 2013, #10; Mon, 29)

From: Thomas Rast <trast@inf.ethz.ch>
Date: May 4, 2013, 08:40 UTC
Message-ID: <87y5bvyw7j.fsf@hexa.v.cablecom.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vppxdgife.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> * jn/config-ignore-inaccessible (2013-04-15) 1 commit
>  - config: allow inaccessible configuration under $HOME
>
>  When $HOME is misconfigured to point at an unreadable directory, we
>  used to complain and die. This loosens the check.
>
>  I do not think we agreed that this is a good idea, though.

As a data point: yesterday on IRC, two users complained that they each had this problem.

  http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git?date=2013-05-03#l3022
  http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git?date=2013-05-03#l3111

So for one thing, "ha ha we told you so" is not an extremely satisfactory answer, especially since we only "told them so" with the recent doc update. Wouldn't a stern warning or even an early error be better? It could be tempered by checking that HOME agrees with what getpwnam says should be the HOME of the existing user, and checking that it is not readable, before warning; more experienced users like the scenario you mention in

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/220661/focus=220921

would make sure that at least one of those conditions is not true.

But for another, they both claim that it fails even with HOME unset(!) and even with a completely empty environment. I cannot reproduce this, but there might be another issue lurking?

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch