Subject: Re: [PATCH v6 0/6] recursively grep across submodules

From: Brandon Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2016 09:45:47 -0800

On 11/30, Jeff King wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 05:28:28PM -0800, Brandon Williams wrote:
> 
> > v6 fixes a race condition which existed in the 'is_submodule_populated'
> > function.  Instead of calling 'resolve_gitdir' to check for the existance of a
> > .git file/directory, use 'stat'.  'resolve_gitdir' calls 'chdir' which can
> > affect other running threads trying to load thier files into a buffer in
> > memory.
> 
> This one passes my stress-test for t7814 (though I imagine you already
> knew that).
> 
> I tried to think of things that could go wrong by using a simple stat()
> instead of resolve_gitdir(). They should only differ when ".git" for
> some reason does not point to a git repository. My initial thought is
> that this might be more vocal about errors, because the child process
> will complain. But actually, the original would already die if the
> ".git" file is funny, so we were pretty vocal already.
> 
> I also wondered whether the sub-process might skip a bogus ".git" file
> and keep looking upward in the filesystem tree (which would confusingly
> end up back in the super-project!). But it looks like we bail hard when
> we see a ".git" file but it's bogus. Which is probably a good thing in
> general for submodules.
> 
> I'm not sure any of that is actually even worth worrying about, as such
> a setup is broken by definition. I just wanted to think it through as a
> devil's advocate, and even that seems pretty reasonable.
> 
> -Peff

Yeah I was trying to think through these scenarios myself last night.
And like you found it seemed alright to let the child process deal with
the .git file/dir as long as once actually exists at that path.  If one
didn't then there would be the possibility that we ended up back at the
superproject, which would result in an infinite loop.  And yeah if the
.git file doesn't resolve to anything sensible then the user probably
mangled their repository somehow anyways.

Thanks again for all the help!

-- 
Brandon Williams