builtin/clone: allow remote helpers to detect repo

In 18c9cb7524 (builtin/clone: create the refdb with the correct object
format, 2023-12-12), we have changed git-clone(1) so that it delays
creation of the refdb until after it has learned about the remote's
object format. This change was required for the reftable backend, which
encodes the object format into the tables. So if we pre-initialized the
refdb with the default object format, but the remote uses a different
object format than that, then the resulting tables would have encoded
the wrong object format.

This change unfortunately breaks remote helpers which try to access the
repository that is about to be created. Because the refdb has not yet
been initialized at the point where we spawn the remote helper, we also
don't yet have "HEAD" or "refs/". Consequently, any Git commands ran by
the remote helper which try to access the repository would fail because
it cannot be discovered.

This is essentially a chicken-and-egg problem: we cannot initialize the
refdb because we don't know about the object format. But we cannot learn
about the object format because the remote helper may be unable to
access the partially-initialized repository.

Ideally, we would address this issue via capabilities. But the remote
helper protocol is not structured in a way that guarantees that the
capability announcement happens before the remote helper tries to access
the repository.

Instead, fix this issue by partially initializing the refdb up to the
point where it becomes discoverable by Git commands.

Reported-by: Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org>
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/setup.c b/setup.c
index b69b1cbc2a..e3b76e84b5 100644
--- a/setup.c
+++ b/setup.c
@@ -1889,6 +1889,13 @@ void initialize_repository_version(int hash_algo,
 	char repo_version_string[10];
 	int repo_version = GIT_REPO_VERSION;
 
+	/*
+	 * Note that we initialize the repository version to 1 when the ref
+	 * storage format is unknown. This is on purpose so that we can add the
+	 * correct object format to the config during git-clone(1). The format
+	 * version will get adjusted by git-clone(1) once it has learned about
+	 * the remote repository's format.
+	 */
 	if (hash_algo != GIT_HASH_SHA1 ||
 	    ref_storage_format != REF_STORAGE_FORMAT_FILES)
 		repo_version = GIT_REPO_VERSION_READ;
@@ -1898,7 +1905,7 @@ void initialize_repository_version(int hash_algo,
 		  "%d", repo_version);
 	git_config_set("core.repositoryformatversion", repo_version_string);
 
-	if (hash_algo != GIT_HASH_SHA1)
+	if (hash_algo != GIT_HASH_SHA1 && hash_algo != GIT_HASH_UNKNOWN)
 		git_config_set("extensions.objectformat",
 			       hash_algos[hash_algo].name);
 	else if (reinit)