Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/1] apply: reject input that touches outside $cwd

From: Jeff King <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2015 13:24:56 -0500

On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 03:48:14PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> By default, a patch that affects outside the working area is
> rejected as a mistake; Git itself never creates such a patch
> unless the user bends backwards and specifies nonstandard
> prefix to "git diff" and friends.
> 
> When `git apply` is used without either `--index` or `--cached`
> option as a "better GNU patch", the user can pass `--allow-uplevel`
> option to override this safety check.  This cannot be used to escape
> outside the working tree when using `--index` or `--cached` to apply
> the patch to the index.

It looks like your new --allow-uplevel goes to verify_path(). So this
isn't just about "..", but it will also protect against applying a patch
inside ".git". Which seems like a good thing to me, but I wonder if the
option name is a little misleading. It is really about applying the same
checks we do for index paths to the non-index mode of "git apply".

>  * Meant to apply on top of the previous one, but these two are
>    about separate and orthogonal issues.

I agree they are orthogonal in concept, though I doubt the symlink tests
here would pass without the previous one (since verify_path does not
know or care about crossing symlink boundaries).

-Peff