[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="http://joeyh.name/"
 ip="209.250.56.47"
 subject="comment 5"
 date="2013-11-06T16:27:49Z"
 content="""
Running the prebuilt tarball build of git-annex, the bug does not occur.

However, if I remove the git shipped with the prebuilt tarball, so it uses the system git, I do see the bug. So, it's apparently git version dependent.

Also, I was able to reproduce it in a amd64 chroot. My other chroot was i386. Somehow architecture specific bug?

---

Instrumenting all calls to git to be logged with the full environment and command, I found this:

<pre>
GIT_INDEX_FILE='/home/foo/annex/.git/annex/index'
--git-dir=/home/foo/annex/.git --work-tree=/home/foo/annex commit --quiet --allow-empty -m created repository
</pre>

This certainly looks like the index file setting for the git-annex branch is somehow leaking out past the branch commit operations. It continued setting that while setting up `gc.auto`; the next call to git after that stopped setting the index file.

The only way I can see offhand this could possibly happen is due to an exception. It may be that on ubuntu an exception is thrown by code that runs a git command with the index file set, for whatever reason, and this causes the code that normally resets it back to not run.

----

Ok, found it! 

<pre>
\"withIndex entered\"

*** Please tell me who you are.

Run

  git config --global user.email \"you@example.com\"
  git config --global user.name \"Your Name\"

to set your account's default identity.
Omit --global to set the identity only in this repository.

fatal: unable to auto-detect email address (got 'foo@darkstar.(none)')
\"withIndex entered\"
\"withIndex cleaned up\"
</pre>

Note lack of clean up after the first withIndex call. Thus leaving the environment passed to git polluted for further calls.

This also explains why it's only happening on some systems, or with some versions of git. git's got all kinds of complexity around its username and email handling code.

I have fixed this in git.
"""]]