Re: [PATCH] Avoid infinite loop in malformed packfiles

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 01:38:35PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > I think it may be worth making this a configurable value
> > (core.maxDeltaDepth or something). Nobody would generally need to tweak
> > it, but it would give an escape hatch for getting people out of a broken
> > situation ("git -c core.maxDeltaDepth=50000 repack" or similar).
> 
> ... meaning "the pack I have has overlong delta chains to read, and
> I am running repack to cut these chains down to more manageable
> level"?  Makes sense.

Exactly.

> As it may be a bit tricky to figure out where we should read such a
> configuration for those who are new to our codebase, here is an
> illustration to give a starting point.  Docs and tests are probably
> needed, too.

It may be hard to test, as I suspect modern versions of Git are not
happy to create such a deep chain. We could test with a lowered value of
the config option, though.

It may also be worth introducing a true cycle using non-git commands.
There's some coverage there in t/t5309-pack-delta-cycles.sh. I think we
were mainly concerned there with how index-pack treats them, and it
would be nice to see how other commands react. Though I guess that
creates another testing difficulty: those other commands would need a
pack index, and we'd refuse to create one. :) So I think it would
require adding code to manually create a bogus idx file (or I guess
shipping one as a fixture).

-Peff