Thread (11 messages) flat view 11 messages, 3 authors, 5d ago

Re: [PATCH] trailers: stop recognizing URLs as trailers

From: Junio C Hamano <hidden>
Date: 2026-08-02 22:36:06

kristofferhaugsbakk@fastmail.com writes:
From: Kristoffer Haugsbakk <redacted>

An HTTPS URL starts with an alphanumeric scheme followed by a colon.
That means that they will be recognized as trailers in a trailer block.
That turns out to be a problem in practice. Let’s stop recognizing these
as trailers by failing the trailer parsing when we:

1. find the separator;
2. the separator and the next two characters form `://`; and
3. we haven’t parsed any whitespace yet.
When I read the problem description, I would have expected you to
say "If we find <token>: at the beginning of the line, check <token>
against known URL schemes like https, ftp, etc. and declare that the
line is not a trailer, if it matches".  Checking against "://" is
much more robust, as it is less likely to happen in random text, and
we avoid maintaining a whitelist of scheme names.  You are certainly
smarter than I am ;-).

Shouldn't we restrict the token preceding "://" more strictly than
simply prohibiting whitespace?
Helped-by: Jeff King [off-list ref]
Signed-off-by: Kristoffer Haugsbakk <redacted>
---
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
diff --git a/trailer.c b/trailer.c
index 6d8ec7fa8d8..971ae459596 100644
--- a/trailer.c
+++ b/trailer.c
@@ -635,8 +635,13 @@ static ssize_t find_separator(const char *line, const char *separators)
 	int whitespace_found = 0;
 	const char *c;
 	for (c = line; *c; c++) {
-		if (strchr(separators, *c))
+		if (strchr(separators, *c)) {
+			/* avoid accidental URL matches (://) */
+			if (*c == ':' && c[1] == '/' && c[2] == '/' &&
How do we know the references to c[1] and c[2] do not access an
unmapped piece of memory?  The answer is that line[] is NUL
terminated, so c[0] == ':' guarantees that c[1] is safe to read and
unless it is NUL (and c[1] =='/' certainly means it is not NUL),
c[2] is safe to read.

OK.  Makes sense to me.

Thanks.
+			    !whitespace_found)
+				return -1;
 			return c - line;
+		}
 		if (!whitespace_found && (isalnum(*c) || *c == '-'))
 			continue;
 		if (c != line && (*c == ' ' || *c == '\t')) {
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