Consume all stdin when rcs_receive short-circuits, to avoid git SIPIPE race.

We had a weird problem where, after moving to a new, faster server,
"git push" would sometimes fail like this:

Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

What turned out to be going on was that git-receive-pack was dying due
to an uncaught SIGPIPE. The SIGPIPE occurred when it tried to write to
the pre-receive hook's stdin. The pre-receive hook, in this case, was
able to do all the checks it needed to do without the input, and so did
exit(0) without consuming it.

Apparently that causes a race. Most of the time, git forks the hook,
writes output to the hook, and then the hook runs, ignores it, and exits.
But sometimes, on our new faster server, git forked the hook, and it
ran, and exited, before git got around to writing to it, resulting in
the SIGPIPE.

write(7, "c9f98c67d70a1cfeba382ec27d87644a"..., 100) = -1 EPIPE (Broken
pipe)
--- SIGPIPE (Broken pipe) @ 0 (0) ---

I think git should ignore SIGPIPE when writing to hooks. Otherwise,
hooks may have to go out of their way to consume all input, and as I've
seen, the races when they fail to do this can lurk undiscovered.

I have written to the git mailing list about this.

As a workaround, consume all stdin before exiting.

diff --git a/IkiWiki/Receive.pm b/IkiWiki/Receive.pm
index c73adfbbb84b34462eaa474ca315570aba85cc44..5908e09f953ad09cb576cae6c956230be497d6df 100644 (file)
--- a/IkiWiki/Receive.pm
+++ b/IkiWiki/Receive.pm
@@ -35,10 +35,17 @@ EOF
                        }
                        "u != $uid";
                } @{$config{untrusted_committers}}).
-               ") exit(0);\n";
+               ") {\n";
 
        
        $ret.=<<"EOF";
+                       /* Trusted user.
+                        * Consume all stdin before exiting, as git may
+                        * otherwise be unhappy. */
+                       char buf[256];
+                       while (read(0, &buf, 256) != 0) {}
+                       exit(0);
+               }
                asprintf(&s, "CALLER_UID=%i", u);
                newenviron[i++]=s;
        }

diff --git a/debian/changelog b/debian/changelog
index 0c64875f1d030dbd4129e9d2bdfe22af393a8dd8..ccdeb8300d5c40f19bbbd0098e37be7b840492b0 100644 (file)
--- a/debian/changelog
+++ b/debian/changelog
@@ -1,3 +1,9 @@
+ikiwiki (3.20111108) UNRELEASED; urgency=low
+
+  * Consume all stdin when rcs_receive short-circuits, to avoid git SIPIPE race.
+
+ -- Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>  Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:14:48 -0400
+
 ikiwiki (3.20111107) unstable; urgency=low
 
   * img: Bugfix to width/height tags for scaled down image when only