Re: git tag -h fatal error with global tag.sort config

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sun, Sep 12, 2021 at 03:27:57PM +0200, SZEDER Gábor wrote:

> Interesting.  It bisects to 47bd3d0c14 (ref-filter: don't look for
> objects when outside of a repository, 2018-11-14), which, based on the
> error message, kind of makes sense, because 'git tag' uses the general
> ref-filter sorting facility.  Now, even if 'git tag -h' is executed in
> a repository, since 99caeed05d (Let 'git <command> -h' show usage
> without a git dir, 2009-11-09) run_builtin() special-cases the '-h'
> option and does not call setup_git_directory(), so cmd_tag() and
> everything invoked from within will mistakenly think that there is no
> repository.  And cmd_tag() parses the config before parsing the
> options (of course, otherwise command line options couldn't override
> the config), so it hits this die() before parse_options would get a
> change to act on the '-h' option.
> 
> Now, 'git branch' uses the same ref-filter sorting, but the equivalent
> 'git -c branch.sort=creatordate branch -h' command does show the usage
> as expected.  The relevant difference between cmd_branch() and
> cmd_tag() is that the former special-cases the '-h' option as well
> just before it would call git_config().  Doing the same in cmd_tag()
> like in the patch below seems to fix this issue, but I'm not sure that
> this is the right fix.
> 
> 
>   ---  >8  ---
> 
> diff --git a/builtin/tag.c b/builtin/tag.c
> index 065b6bf093..31b8cc4600 100644
> --- a/builtin/tag.c
> +++ b/builtin/tag.c
> @@ -485,6 +485,9 @@ int cmd_tag(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
>  
>  	setup_ref_filter_porcelain_msg();
>  
> +	if (argc == 2 && !strcmp(argv[1], "-h"))
> +		usage_with_options(git_tag_usage, options);
> +
>  	git_config(git_tag_config, sorting_tail);
>  
>  	memset(&opt, 0, sizeof(opt));

I think part of the problem is that git_tag_config() is pretty eager to
parse the ref format. You can similarly see:

  $ git -c tag.sort=foobar tag -h
  fatal: unknown field name: foobar

If git_tag_config() just kept strings, and then we later fed them to
a parser (when we knew they were needed), that would be an appropriate
time to bail.

We do something similar with verify_ref_format(); it is just a string
until we know we are ready to use it. But here, the format that is being
used for sorting gets fed early to parse_ref_sorting(). I guess it is a
bit more complicated, because it is generating a linked list. But maybe
it could generate a list of to-be-parsed entries, with a function like
verify_sort_format() to validate them.

-Peff