Subject: Re: [PATCH] http-backend: write newlines to stderr when responding with errors

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2026 10:25:23 -0800

KJ Tsanaktsidis <[email-masked]> writes:

> From: KJ Tsanaktsidis <[email-masked]>
>
> The not_found and forbidden methods currently do not write a newline to
> stderr after the error message. This means that if git-http-backend is
> invoked through something like fcgiwrap, and the stderr of that fcgiwrap
> process is sent to a logging daemon (e.g. journald), the error messages
> of several git-http-backend invocations will just get strung together,
> e.g.
>
>> Not a git repository: '/var/lib/git/foo.git'Not a git repository: '/var/lib/git/foo.git'Not a git repository: '/var/lib/git/foo.git'
>
> I think it's git-http-backend's responsibility to format these messages
> properly, rather than it being fcgiwrap's job to notice that the script
> didn't terminate stderr with a newline and do so itself.

Now another question is which between the callers and these two
helper functions is responsible to ensure that the message
terminates with LF.  As these functions can be called only once, I
think letting them add LF makes sense (if they can be called twice
or more, we can imagine that a caller may find it useful to make two
calls to produce a single log entry by ending only the later call
with LF, but such a use-case clearly cannot be supported with these
NORETURN functions).  So I think this design makes sense.

> Signed-off-by: KJ Tsanaktsidis <[email-masked]>
> ---
>  http-backend.c | 8 ++++++--
>  1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/http-backend.c b/http-backend.c
> index 52f0483dd3..bda8bb91e1 100644
> --- a/http-backend.c
> +++ b/http-backend.c
> @@ -143,8 +143,10 @@ static NORETURN void not_found(struct strbuf *hdr, const char *err, ...)
>  	end_headers(hdr);
>  
>  	va_start(params, err);
> -	if (err && *err)
> +	if (err && *err) {
>  		vfprintf(stderr, err, params);
> +		fprintf(stderr, "\n");

Somehow it feels overly heavyweight to call fprintf() just to send a
single literal byte to the standard error stream.  putc('\n', stderr)
perhaps?  The same comment forr the other hunk.

> +	}
>  	va_end(params);
>  	exit(0);
>  }
> @@ -159,8 +161,10 @@ static NORETURN void forbidden(struct strbuf *hdr, const char *err, ...)
>  	end_headers(hdr);
>  
>  	va_start(params, err);
> -	if (err && *err)
> +	if (err && *err) {
>  		vfprintf(stderr, err, params);
> +		fprintf(stderr, "\n");
> +	}
>  	va_end(params);
>  	exit(0);
>  }