Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 3/3] *: avoid "whitelist"

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 13:19:58 +0200

On Fri, Jul 15 2022, Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget wrote:

> From: Derrick Stolee <[email-masked]>
> [...]
> -	logerror("'%s': not in whitelist", path);
> +	logerror("'%s': not in directory list", path);
>  	return NULL;		/* Fallthrough. Deny by default */
>  }
>  	if (strict_paths && (!ok_paths || !*ok_paths))
> -		die("option --strict-paths requires a whitelist");
> +		die("option --strict-paths requires a directory list");
>  
>  	if (base_path && !is_directory(base_path))
>  		die("base-path '%s' does not exist or is not a directory",

The former here is worse than before, which relates to the latter.

Put yourself in the shoes of a user who gets this error message. You
then do "man git-daemon", search for "whitelist", and the only thing
you'll find are references to --strict-paths and --interpolated-path,
which puts you on the right path.

IOW I don't care about the term "whitelist" here, I care that it it has
(goes and counts...) 5 occurances in the manpage, directorty has 16.

And SYNOPSIS of "git-daemon" says "...[<directory...]", so that
hypothehtical user is probably wondering e.g. if the directory they
provided on argv is bad. It's not just 5 v.s. 16, it's that we've
introduced jargon we only used for that feature, but now we use a vague
general term.

So we need to tell the user *what directory*. That's obviously easy, we
should refer back to the option that brought us here.

So per [1] I really welcome any improvements to the docs, but I was also
expecting to find various issues related to the origin of this series
blindly replacing things :( Please look a bit more at the bigger picture
beyond the specific hunks being changed, I might have missed some
similar issues on this read-through...

1. https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/