remote-curl: don't hang when a server dies before any output

In the event that a HTTP server closes the connection after giving a
200 but before giving any packets, we don't want to hang forever
waiting for a response that will never come.  Instead, we should die
immediately.

One case where this happens is when attempting to fetch a dangling
object by its object name.  In this case, the server dies before
sending any data.  Prior to this patch, fetch-pack would wait for
data from the server, and remote-curl would wait for fetch-pack,
causing a deadlock.

Despite this patch, there is other possible malformed input that could
cause the same deadlock (e.g. a half-finished pktline, or a pktline but
no trailing flush).  There are a few possible solutions to this:

1. Allowing remote-curl to tell fetch-pack about the EOF (so that
fetch-pack could know that no more data is coming until it says
something else).  This is tricky because an out-of-band signal would
be required, or the http response would have to be re-framed inside
another layer of pkt-line or something.

2. Make remote-curl understand some of the protocol.  It turns out
that in addition to understanding pkt-line, it would need to watch for
ack/nak.  This is somewhat fragile, as information about the protocol
would end up in two places.  Also, pkt-lines which are already at the
length limit would need special handling.

Both of these solutions would require a fair amount of work, whereas
this hack is easy and solves at least some of the problem.

Still to do: it would be good to give a better error message
than "fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly".

Signed-off-by: David Turner <dturner@twosigma.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/remote-curl.c b/remote-curl.c
index f14c41f4c0..ee4423659f 100644
--- a/remote-curl.c
+++ b/remote-curl.c
@@ -400,6 +400,7 @@ struct rpc_state {
 	size_t pos;
 	int in;
 	int out;
+	int any_written;
 	struct strbuf result;
 	unsigned gzip_request : 1;
 	unsigned initial_buffer : 1;
@@ -456,6 +457,8 @@ static size_t rpc_in(char *ptr, size_t eltsize,
 {
 	size_t size = eltsize * nmemb;
 	struct rpc_state *rpc = buffer_;
+	if (size)
+		rpc->any_written = 1;
 	write_or_die(rpc->in, ptr, size);
 	return size;
 }
@@ -659,6 +662,8 @@ retry:
 	curl_easy_setopt(slot->curl, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, rpc_in);
 	curl_easy_setopt(slot->curl, CURLOPT_FILE, rpc);
 
+
+	rpc->any_written = 0;
 	err = run_slot(slot, NULL);
 	if (err == HTTP_REAUTH && !large_request) {
 		credential_fill(&http_auth);
@@ -667,6 +672,9 @@ retry:
 	if (err != HTTP_OK)
 		err = -1;
 
+	if (!rpc->any_written)
+		err = -1;
+
 	curl_slist_free_all(headers);
 	free(gzip_body);
 	return err;