Thanks for all your replies. Much appreciated.

On 26/06/2024 20.11, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Phillip Wood [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

To expand an this a little - a couple of times I've wanted to checkout
a bare repository that is owned by a different user. It is a pain to
have to add a new config setting just for a one-off checkout. Being
able to adjust the config on the command line would be very useful in
that case.

True.  As long as it is deemed safe to honor the one-off "git -c
safe.directory=..." from the command line, for the purpose of this
"I who am running this 'git' process hereby declare that I trust
this and that repository", I think it would be the best solution
for the "git daemon" use case.

How does one pass "-c safe.directory=…" to git-http-backend?

I currently have an Apache config snippet like

SetEnv GIT_PROJECT_ROOT /var/www/example.org/htdocs/git
SetEnv GIT_HTTP_EXPORT_ALL
ScriptAlias /git/ /usr/libexec/git-core/git-http-backend/

<Files "git-http-backend">
   Require all granted
   AcceptPathInfo On
</Files>

to serve git repositories.

Granted, the apache user has a home directory, so I am probably able to 
set save.directory via ~/.gitconfig.

However, the point here is that git is often invoked indirectly, with no 
control over the command line arguments that are passed to it. On the 
other hand, one has usually control over the environment variables.

I agree that "-c safe.directory=…" is preferable to 
GIT_IGNORE_INSECURE_OWNER. However, sometimes using "-c 
safe.directory=…" is cumbersome and maybe even impossible.

One alternative to GIT_IGNORE_INSECURE_OWNER would be a generic 
GIT_EXTRA_ARGS environment variable. So one could set

GIT_EXTRA_ARGS="-c safe.directory=…"

Not saying that I like the idea, just pointing out this option.

- Florian