# Possible regression in git-http-backend

2 messages from 2017-04-25 to 2017-04-27. Participants: Daniel Wallace, Jeff King.
Thread: https://gitlist.dev/t/45801

## Daniel Wallace, 2017-04-25 23:39

Subject: Possible regression in git-http-backend
Message-ID: <CAA2+9hC4d0+igaSV6ziC55=KZGYrZN2A+8-Enhm0F4hExH3m_Q@mail.gmail.com>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/CAA2%2B9hC4d0%2BigaSV6ziC55%3DKZGYrZN2A%2B8-Enhm0F4hExH3m_Q%40mail.gmail.com

```
I am not sure if this is a regression or not, but I wanted to get feedback.

It looks like this commit changed some behavior in git-http-backend

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/commit/?id=6bc0cb5176a5e42ca4a74e3558e8f0790ed09bb1

The change that it has made is that it no git-upload-pack hangs when
uwsgi doesn't close stdin.

http://lists.unbit.it/pipermail/uwsgi/2016-April/008440.html

This was the only place I could find this discussed online for uwsgi
(but I did find several blog posts comments mentioning the issue).  It
looks like it was worked around in uwsgi >= 2.0.13 by adding the
setting `cgi-close-stdin-on-eof = true`.  But there was some
discussion last year that this shouldn't be needed based on the RFC
for cgi?

http://lists.unbit.it/pipermail/uwsgi/2016-May/008462.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20100212094332/http://hoohoo.ncsa.illinois.edu/cgi/in.html

"""
The server will send CONTENT_LENGTH bytes on this file descriptor.
Remember that it will give the CONTENT_TYPE of the data as well. The
server is in no way obligated to send end-of-file after the script reads
CONTENT_LENGTH bytes.
"""

Here is a gist for providing a config setup, I used the latest nginx
from the nginx repo for centos 7 and uwsgi 2.0.14 from epel.  The
setup requires starting nginx.service and uwsgi.service and creating a
bare repo in /srv/git/ and running

https://gist.github.com/gtmanfred/8b2e26b07db3c75094d0607048b2c828

Thanks,
Daniel

```

## Jeff King, 2017-04-27 09:31

Subject: Re: Possible regression in git-http-backend
Message-ID: <20170427093130.jnbuxuhksi33okry@sigill.intra.peff.net>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/20170427093130.jnbuxuhksi33okry%40sigill.intra.peff.net
In-Reply-To: <CAA2+9hC4d0+igaSV6ziC55=KZGYrZN2A+8-Enhm0F4hExH3m_Q@mail.gmail.com>

```
On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 05:39:16PM -0600, Daniel Wallace wrote:

> I am not sure if this is a regression or not, but I wanted to get feedback.
> 
> It looks like this commit changed some behavior in git-http-backend
> 
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/commit/?id=6bc0cb5176a5e42ca4a74e3558e8f0790ed09bb1
> 
> The change that it has made is that it no git-upload-pack hangs when
> uwsgi doesn't close stdin.

Yeah, I think that could be considered an unintended regression. The
original code _also_ didn't respect CONTENT_LENGTH and would potentially
just keep reading. But because it was reading formatted data, as long as
the data was well-formed, it would generally stop reading where the
webserver expected it. So it mostly worked; even though there were cases
that would hang, they were presumably rare.

People using IIS ran into a similar thing, I think. There was a patch,
but it had a lot of problems. I do think it would be reasonable to:

  1. Respect CONTENT_LENGTH if it's set, and never read more than that
     many bytes.

  2. Handle sentinel values for CONTENT_LENGTH that tell us the data is
     streaming in and we must read until EOF (Apache leaves
     CONTENT_LENGTH unset in this case, and apparently IIS sets it to
     -1).

  3. Ideally, do both of those not just in the buffering case added by
     6bc0cb517, but for other input as well. That might be hard, though,
     because I think we literally hand off the descriptor to
     sub-programs for some operations. So even if we just handled the
     one case, that would at least fix any regressions caused by
     6bc0cb517.

Here are links to the previous discussion:

  http://public-inbox.org/git/F0F5A56A22F20D4CB4A03BB8D6658797E260E0E3@SERVER2011.CS-SOFTWARE.local/

  http://public-inbox.org/git/F0F5A56A22F20D4CB4A03BB8D6658797E261A3D6@SERVER2011.CS-SOFTWARE.local/

-Peff

```
