remote-curl: fall back to default hash outside repo

When a remote helper like git-remote-http is invoked outside of a repository (for example, by running git ls-remote in a non-git directory), setup_git_directory_gently() leaves the_hash_algo uninitialized as NULL. If the user has a globally configured fetch refspec, remote-curl attempts to parse it during initialization. Inside parse_refspec(), it checks whether the LHS of the refspec is an exact OID by evaluating llen == the_hash_algo->hexsz. Because the_hash_algo is NULL, this results in a segmentation fault. In 9e89dcb66a (builtin/ls-remote: fall back to SHA1 outside of a repo, 2024-08-02), we added a workaround to ls-remote to fall back to the default hash algorithm to prevent exactly this type of crash when parsing refspec capabilities. However, because remote-curl runs as a separate process, it does not inherit that fallback and crashes anyway. Instead of pushing a NULL-guard workaround down into parse_refspec(), fix this by mirroring the ls-remote workaround directly in remote-curl.c. If we are operating outside a repository, initialize the_hash_algo to GIT_HASH_DEFAULT. This keeps the HTTP transport consistent with non-HTTP transports that execute in-process, preventing crashes without altering the generic refspec parsing logic. Reported-by: Jo Liss <joliss@gmail.com> Helped-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: K Jayatheerth <jayatheerthkulkarni2005@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

K Jayatheerth committed Mar 24, 2026 at 07:27 UTC 649c768a25b191dbea72c7bacaed5b81ef195bf5
2 files changed +14
remote-curl.c
+7
@@ -1551,6 +1551,13 @@ int cmd_main(int argc, const char **argv)
1551 goto cleanup;
1552 }
1553
1554 + /*
1555 + * yuck, see 9e89dcb66a (builtin/ls-remote: fall back to SHA1 outside
1556 + * of a repo, 2024-08-02)
1557 + */
1558 + if (nongit)
1559 + repo_set_hash_algo(the_repository, GIT_HASH_DEFAULT);
1560 +
1561 options.verbosity = 1;
1562 options.progress = !!isatty(2);
1563 options.thin = 1;
t/t5551-http-fetch-smart.sh
+7
@@ -782,4 +782,11 @@ test_expect_success 'tag following always works over v0 http' '
782 test_cmp expect actual
783 '
784
785 +test_expect_success 'ls-remote outside repo does not segfault with fetch refspec' '
786 + nongit git \
787 + -c remote.origin.url="$HTTPD_URL/smart/repo.git" \
788 + -c remote.origin.fetch=anything \
789 + ls-remote origin
790 +'
791 +
792 test_done