Re: Unable to index file

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Dec 12, 2008, 18:07 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0812120956050.3340@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <f25d5ad20812120647m646698d7t9849c8ccb08c465e@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, 12 Dec 2008, Ramon Tayag wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> 
> I've come across a problem that I don't believe lies in Rails.  You
> needn't be familiar, I think, with Rails to see what's wrong.
> 
> I can't seem to add the files that are in
> http://dev.rubyonrails.org/archive/rails_edge.zip
> 
> 1) Unpack the zip
> 2) Initialize a git repo inside the folder that was unpacked
> 3) git add .
> 
> See the errors.. :o http://pastie.org/337571

What platform/filesystem is this?

Git is rather particular about symlinks, and it looks like your platform does something odd, and that makes git unhappy about your symlink.

In particular:

	ls -l vendor/rails/actionpack/test/fixtures/layout_tests/layouts/ 
	...
	lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 48 2008-12-12 18:22 symlinked -> ../../symlink_parent

notice how the symlink content is "../../symlink_parent", but then take a look at the _size_ of the symlink: 48 bytes.

Git expects the lstat() information to match the return from readlink(), and it doesn't.

For exact details, see "index_path()" in sha1_file.c:

        case S_IFLNK:   
                len = xsize_t(st->st_size);
                target = xmalloc(len + 1);
                if (readlink(path, target, len + 1) != st->st_size) {
                        char *errstr = strerror(errno);

ie we consider it an error if we get less than st_size characters back from readlink().

Now, admittedly git is probably being really annoyingly anal about this all, and we probably should loosen the restrictions on it a bit, but I'd like to know why it happens. I cannot recall this having been reported before, so it's some specific filesystem or OS that causes this, I think.

		Linus