Invalid git core.abbrev values cause failure to open repositories

[davidkna]

Bug Report

Current Behavior

none of the git modules are working in a rather large (private) monorepo. for a smaller public repo, they do present. i do not have any submodules. i'd be happy to see if theres any debug flags to help isolate the problem. i'm just concerned that the new git crate is failing on this repo. my git version is 2.37.2

@daniel-white (#4266)

[davidkna]

@daniel-white Please post the output of STARSHIP_LOG=trace starship module git_status. Is the repo owned by your system user? Do you know if the repo follows a special setup, for instance to improve monorepo performance?

[daniel-white]

nope we just normally use git to manage it. we use nx but thats tooling on the inside, not with git.

as for the ownership of the directory, its owned by my user account.

[TRACE] - (starship): Parsed arguments: Cli {
    command: Module {
        name: Some(
            "git_status",
        ),
        list: false,
        properties: Properties {
            status_code: None,
            pipestatus: None,
            terminal_width: 80,
            path: None,
            logical_path: None,
            cmd_duration: None,
            keymap: "viins",
            jobs: 0,
        },
    },
}
[DEBUG] - (starship::config): STARSHIP_CONFIG is not set
[DEBUG] - (starship::config): Using default config path: /Users/danielwhite/.config/starship.toml
[TRACE] - (starship::utils): Trying to read from "/Users/danielwhite/.config/starship.toml"
[TRACE] - (starship::utils): File read successfully
[TRACE] - (starship::config): Config file content: "
[character]
success_symbol = "[\\$](bold green)"
error_symbol = "[\\$](bold red)"

[aws]
disabled = true

[nodejs]
symbol = "⬢"

[gcloud]
disabled = true

# [env_var.APPLE_ARCH]
# symbol = "💻"
# format = "$symbol [$env_value]($style)"
# style = "white"
"
[DEBUG] - (starship::config): Config parsed: Table({"character": Table({"success_symbol": String("[\\$](bold green)"), "error_symbol": String("[\\$](bold red)")}), "aws": Table({"disabled": Boolean(true)}), "nodejs": Table({"symbol": String("⬢")}), "gcloud": Table({"disabled": Boolean(true)})})
[TRACE] - (starship::context): Received completed pipestatus of None
[TRACE] - (starship::config): No config found for "git_status": Option "git_status" not found
[TRACE] - (starship::modules): Took 1.631791ms to compute module "git_status"
[TRACE] - (starship::config): No config found for "git_status": Option "git_status" not found

[TRACE] - (starship::context): Received completed pipestatus of None
[TRACE] - (starship::config): No config found for "git_branch": Option "git_branch" not found
[TRACE] - (starship::modules): Took 1.554ms to compute module "git_branch"
[TRACE] - (starship::config): No config found for "git_branch": Option "git_branch" not found

[davidkna]

@daniel-white It seems like the repo isn't being discovered. Please post a list of the files in the base level of the .git directory. Logging is a bit lacking for this step. If possible, please also share the log messages with #4273 applied.

@Byron Do you have any ideas on how to best debug this or on possible causes? In particular, do you know any gix/ein commands that could help with debugging?

[daniel-white]

COMMIT_EDITMSG
FETCH_HEAD
HEAD
ORIG_HEAD
config
description
fork-settings
hooks
index
info
issuetracker
logs
objects
packed-refs
refs

[daniel-white]

also i tried installing gitoxide with cargo install gitoxide, and its requiring me to install a cmake toolchain :/

[davidkna]

@daniel-white try --no-default-features --features small (default-features = false should also avoid cmake for starship builds)

[daniel-white]

so this is interesting

$ gix config
Error: The value for 'core.abbrev' cannot be empty

where that works in the other repo.

setting that to auto allows gix config then starship to run.

i wonder if theres a problem in gitoxide that makes this mandatory where libgit2 and the like more forgiving.

one can repro if with git config core.abbrev "" and git config --unset core.abbrev restores it

[davidkna]

@daniel-white Thanks for the update!

[Byron]

@Byron Do you have any ideas on how to best debug this or on possible causes? In particular, do you know any gix/ein commands that could help with debugging?

Indeed, the only way to see what's going on is to run gix - since it will use discover() to open a Repository, failing to do so will fail the whole command. Tracing is not available in gitoxide yet.

Thanks everyone for debugging this, even though the error is quite intentional and definitely worth a thought.

$ gix config
Error: The value for 'core.abbrev' cannot be empty

If a lesson is to be learned here, then it's probably that gitoxide should be more fault tolerant where possible, and with core.abbrev it's definitely possible to set it to a sensible value in this case. It's interesting that git itself refuses to work on such a repo as well with…

❯ git log
error: missing value for 'core.abbrev'
fatal: bad config variable 'core.abbrev' in file '.git/config' at line 8

…in my case.

As a catch-22 though, since gix config wants to initialize a Repository, it fails on that and one wouldn't be able to run a gix command on such repository ever again.

I will change this behaviour and review other places as well to make startup as forgiving as possible.

[Byron]

I have implemented this by interpreting configuration values leniently by default, which is behaviour more suitable to API users or starship in this case, while allowing to opt-in to strict and 'correct' mode which errors on unsupported values to force them to be fixed, similar to what git does. The gix program was also adjusted to use the 'strict' mode so it would choke similarly to git, while allowing gix config to be lenient automatically.

A new release will be created in the course of my day and starship should be able to pick up the fixes in the course of the same day (I am 6 hours ahead of starship maintainers).