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[2.55.0] fixup! gvfs: add global command pre and post hook procs#956

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dscho merged 2 commits into
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derrickstolee:post-command-recurse-2.55
Jul 15, 2026
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[2.55.0] fixup! gvfs: add global command pre and post hook procs#956
dscho merged 2 commits into
microsoft:vfs-2.55.0from
derrickstolee:post-command-recurse-2.55

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Users were noticing some cases of infinite loops with the error message:

fatal: recursion detected in die handler

It's only happening for repos with a post-command hook, but it's not deterministic. I'm not sure what is triggering the problem, but the post-command hook is definitely able to recurse with its existing logic around the run_post_hook variable.

Move this earlier to avoid a potential double-call. It's a fixup to the introduction of the method, which may cause conflicts with later adjustments to this method still in the branch thicket (but maybe those should be squashed, too).

See #955 for the version on 2.54.0.

Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
@derrickstolee derrickstolee force-pushed the post-command-recurse-2.55 branch from 4e7ba23 to a762728 Compare July 13, 2026 15:17
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I had a test in an earlier version, but it was a copilot test that broke in some cases and also didn't actually break without the code change. I'm not sure how to reproduce it, but the code seems obviously correct to me.

@derrickstolee derrickstolee force-pushed the post-command-recurse-2.55 branch from 17ec834 to 98871a8 Compare July 13, 2026 17:44
Some users reported issues of repeated messages:

  fatal: recursion detected in die handler

This wasn't happening every time, but we eventually captured a
GIT_TRACE2_PERF log file with this issue and revealed an interesting
internal detail, failing with this message:

  unable to format message: %4d-%02d-%02dT%02d:%02d:%02d.%06ldZ

This specific format string tracks to tr2_tbuf_utc_datetime_extended()
in trace2/tr2_tbuf.c. This logic began as tr2_tbuf_utc_time() in
ee4512e (trace2: create new combined trace facility, 2019-02-22) but
was later split in bad229a (trace2: clarify UTC datetime formatting,
2019-04-15).

This use of xsnprintf() is writing a very specific datetime format into a
32-character buffer. The format requires that the input data will not
overflow the format digits or the buffer will not hold the result. Since
we are using xsnprintf() here, those failures turn into die() events.

This method and its siblings, tr2_tbuf_local_time() and
tr2_tbuf_utc_datetime(), are used in the tracing library. The extended
form is used only for the 'event' format, which these users were using
via a config setting for use in client-side telemetry. The non-extended
form is used to help generate the 'SID' that defines the process in the
traces.

Not only are these inappropriate times for a failure, but the extended
method is called specifially during the 'atexit' event, which was
triggering this problem in a loop as the 'atexit' event would be
retriggered by the die().

I could not determine the exact cause of why these errors started
occuring in a bunch. My best guess is that these users are dogfooding an
early operating system version that is more likely to fail in the
gettimeofday() function and thus leaves the structures uninitialized and
potentially violating the expected values.

However, for full defense-in-depth I made several modifications:

1. Both 'tv' and 'tm' structs are initialized with zero values, allowing
   an erroring gettimeofday() or gmtime_r() method to leave them
   zero-valued. A zero-valued date is better than a die() here.

2. Replace the use of xsnprintf() with snprintf() to avoid the
   possibility of calling die() here. Instead, check the response to see
   if there was a failure. On failure, put a blank value into the buffer
   instead of possibly allowing a value that would not format correctly
   for a trace2 consumer. This value should be seen as obviously wrong
   and therefore signals a problem.

As the core issue in this code seems to require a system method
returning an error, no test accompanies this change.

This change removes all uses of xsnprintf() from the trace2/ directory.
There are two uses of xstrdup() that could be considered for removal,
but they only die() on out-of-memory errors instead of formatting
issues. I chose to leave those in place for now.

Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
@derrickstolee derrickstolee force-pushed the post-command-recurse-2.55 branch from 98871a8 to c694a5b Compare July 14, 2026 18:34
@dscho dscho merged commit 0359381 into microsoft:vfs-2.55.0 Jul 15, 2026
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2 participants