config: allow inaccessible configuration under $HOME

The changes v1.7.12.1~2^2~4 (config: warn on inaccessible files,
2012-08-21) and v1.8.1.1~22^2~2 (config: treat user and xdg config
permission problems as errors, 2012-10-13) were intended to prevent
important configuration (think "[transfer] fsckobjects") from being
ignored when the configuration is unintentionally unreadable (for
example with EIO on a flaky filesystem, or with ENOMEM due to a DoS
attack).  Usually ~/.gitconfig and ~/.config/git are readable by the
current user, and if they aren't then it would be easy to fix those
permissions, so the damage from adding this check should have been
minimal.

Unfortunately the access() check often trips when git is being run as
a server.  A daemon (such as inetd or git-daemon) starts as "root",
creates a listening socket, and then drops privileges, meaning that
when git commands are invoked they cannot access $HOME and die with

 fatal: unable to access '/root/.config/git/config': Permission denied

Any patch to fix this would have one of three problems:

  1. We annoy sysadmins who need to take an extra step to handle HOME
     when dropping privileges (the current behavior, or any other
     proposal that they have to opt into).

  2. We annoy sysadmins who want to set HOME when dropping privileges,
     either by making what they want to do impossible, or making them
     set an extra variable or option to accomplish what used to work
     (e.g., a patch to git-daemon to set HOME when --user is passed).

  3. We loosen the check, so some cases which might be noteworthy are
     not caught.

This patch is of type (3).

Treat user and xdg configuration that are inaccessible due to
permissions (EACCES) as though no user configuration was provided at
all.

An alternative method would be to check if $HOME is readable, but that
would not help in cases where the user who dropped privileges had a
globally readable HOME with only .config or .gitconfig being private.

This does not change the behavior when /etc/gitconfig or .git/config
is unreadable (since those are more serious configuration errors),
nor when ~/.gitconfig or ~/.config/git is unreadable due to problems
other than permissions.

Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Improved-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/git-compat-util.h b/git-compat-util.h
index e715285e7c..fc1ef23519 100644
--- a/git-compat-util.h
+++ b/git-compat-util.h
@@ -687,8 +687,9 @@ int remove_or_warn(unsigned int mode, const char *path);
  * Call access(2), but warn for any error except "missing file"
  * (ENOENT or ENOTDIR).
  */
-int access_or_warn(const char *path, int mode);
-int access_or_die(const char *path, int mode);
+#define ACCESS_EACCES_OK (1U << 0)
+int access_or_warn(const char *path, int mode, unsigned flag);
+int access_or_die(const char *path, int mode, unsigned flag);
 
 /* Warn on an inaccessible file that ought to be accessible */
 void warn_on_inaccessible(const char *path);