describe: handle blob traversal with no commits

When describing a blob, we traverse from HEAD, remembering each commit
we saw, and then checking each blob to report the containing commit.
But if we haven't seen any commits at all, we'll segfault (we store the
"current" commit as an oid initialized to the null oid, causing
lookup_commit_reference() to return NULL).

This shouldn't be able to happen normally. We always start our traversal
at HEAD, which must be a commit (a property which is enforced by the
refs code). But you can trigger the segfault like this:

  blob=$(echo foo | git hash-object -w --stdin)
  echo $blob >.git/HEAD
  git describe $blob

We can instead catch this case and return an empty result, which hits
the usual "we didn't find $blob while traversing HEAD" error.

This is a minor lie in that we did "find" the blob. And this even hints
at a bigger problem in this code: what if the traversal pointed to the
blob as _not_ part of a commit at all, but we had previously filled in
the recorded "current commit"? One could imagine this happening due to a
tag pointing directly to the blob in question.

But that can't happen, because we only traverse from HEAD, never from
any other refs. And the intent of the blob-describing code is to find
blobs within commits.

So I think this matches the original intent as closely as we can (and
again, this segfault cannot be triggered without corrupting your
repository!).

The test here does not use the formula above, which works only for the
files backend (and not reftables). Instead we use another loophole to
create the bogus state using only Git commands. See the comment in the
test for details.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <[email protected]>

Author: peff

builtin/describe.c

@@ -507,8 +507,10 @@ static void process_object(struct object *obj, const char *path, void *data)
 
 	if (oideq(pcd->looking_for, &obj->oid) && !pcd->dst->len) {
 		reset_revision_walk();
-		describe_commit(&pcd->current_commit, pcd->dst);
-		strbuf_addf(pcd->dst, ":%s", path);
+		if (!is_null_oid(&pcd->current_commit)) {
+			describe_commit(&pcd->current_commit, pcd->dst);
+			strbuf_addf(pcd->dst, ":%s", path);
+		}
 		free_commit_list(pcd->revs->commits);
 		pcd->revs->commits = NULL;
 	}

t/t6120-describe.sh

@@ -423,6 +423,22 @@ test_expect_success 'describe blob on an unborn branch' '
 	test_grep "cannot search .* on an unborn branch" actual
 '
 
+# This test creates a repository state that we generally try to disallow: HEAD
+# is pointing to an object that is not a commit. The ref update code forbids
+# non-commit writes directly to HEAD or to any branch in refs/heads/.  But we
+# can use the loophole of pointing HEAD to another non-branch ref (something we
+# should forbid, but don't for historical reasons).
+#
+# Do not take this test as an endorsement of the loophole! If we ever tighten
+# it, it is reasonable to just drop this test entirely.
+test_expect_success 'describe blob on a non-commit HEAD' '
+	oldbranch=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD) &&
+	test_when_finished "git symbolic-ref HEAD $oldbranch" &&
+	git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/tags/test-blob &&
+	test_must_fail git describe test-blob 2>actual &&
+	test_grep "blob .* not reachable from HEAD" actual
+'
+
 test_expect_success ULIMIT_STACK_SIZE 'name-rev works in a deep repo' '
 	i=1 &&
 	while test $i -lt 8000