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Re: gitignore as symbolic link

From
Matheus Tavares <matheus.bernardino@usp.br>
Date
Oct 22, 2021, 22:40 UTC
Message-ID
<CAHd-oW50puNCrYTQhR4qffgtP6-wJerWLhmhCV+nYcLVNu+CBg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To
<YXLro/8c1Feg6TcN@kitchen>
On Fri, Oct 22, 2021 at 1:57 PM Rene Kita <mail@rkta.de> wrote:
Show 12 quoted lines
>
> On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 05:07:44PM -0800, Justus Ranvier wrote:
> > I have several repositories where the top level .gitignore file is a
> > symbolic link to the actual file which is contained in a submodule which all
> > the repositories share.
> >
> > This worked fine up to and including version 2.31.1 but as of 2.32.0 running
> > any command which would cause .gitignore to be read results in a "too many
> > levels of symbolic links error" and git behaves as if .gitignore is not
> > present.
> >
> This was fixed in commit a185dd58ecc17f2ea16985d59c9bb7b09bec7775 [1].

Hmm, the behavior Justus described is actually related to another change. Since v2.32.0, git no longer follows ".gitattributes", ".gitignore" and ".mailmap" if they are symbolic links. It does that by open()-ing these files with the O_NOFOLLOW flag, which returns ELOOP ("too many levels of symbolic links error") when the basename is a symlink. So the behavior you experienced is actually not a bug, but an intended change.

For a full explanation please see a2ef579e261 ("attr: do not respect symlinks for in-tree .gitattributes", 2021-02-16) [2] and feb9b7792f ("exclude: do not respect symlinks for in-tree .gitignore", 2021-02-16) [3].

But the short version is: git accesses these files either from the working tree or the object store (think, e.g. a bare repo). Git never follows symlinks in the second case, so following them on the working tree was an inconsistent behavior which was fixed. (This also has a security implication, in the sense that it could be dangerous to follow symlinks that lead to paths outside the repository.)

Note that "core.excludesFile" and "$GIT_DIR/info/exclude" are still allowed to be symlinks.

[2]: https://github.com/git/git/commit/2ef579e261 [3]: https://github.com/git/git/commit/feb9b7792f

> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqqlf83h2a7.fsf@gitster.g/
Previous: Rene KitaNext: Justus Ranvier
Message 3 of 8 in “gitignore as symbolic link”
  1. Justus RanvierOct 22, 2021
  2. Rene KitaOct 22, 2021
  3. Matheus TavaresOct 22, 2021
  4. Justus RanvierOct 22, 2021
  5. Justus RanvierOct 22, 2021
  6. brian m. carlsonOct 23, 2021
  7. Justus RanvierOct 23, 2021
  8. Ævar Arnfjörð BjarmasonOct 23, 2021

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