Roberto Tyley 7f684a2aff Tolerate zlib deflation with window size < 32Kb ...

Git currently reports loose objects as 'corrupt' if they've been
deflated using a window size less than 32Kb, because the
experimental_loose_object() function doesn't recognise the header
byte as a zlib header. This patch makes the function tolerant of
all valid window sizes (15-bit to 8-bit) - but doesn't sacrifice
it's accuracy in distingushing the standard loose-object format
from the experimental (now abandoned) format.

On memory constrained systems zlib may use a much smaller window
size - working on Agit, I found that Android uses a 4KB window;
giving a header byte of 0x48, not 0x78. Consequently all loose
objects generated appear 'corrupt', which is why Agit is a read-only
Git client at this time - I don't want my client to generate Git
repos that other clients treat as broken :(

This patch makes Git tolerant of different deflate settings - it
might appear that it changes experimental_loose_object() to the point
where it could incorrectly identify the experimental format as the
standard one, but the two criteria (bitmask & checksum) can only
give a false result for an experimental object where both of the
following are true:

1) object size is exactly 8 bytes when uncompressed (bitmask)
2) [single-byte in-pack git type&size header] * 256
   + [1st byte of the following zlib header] % 31 = 0 (checksum)

As it happens, for all possible combinations of valid object type
(1-4) and window bits (0-7), the only time when the checksum will be
divisible by 31 is for 0x1838 - ie object type *1*, a Commit - which,
due the fields all Commit objects must contain, could never be as
small as 8 bytes in size.

Given this, the combination of the two criteria (bitmask & checksum)
always correctly determines the buffer format, and is more tolerant
than the previous version.

The alternative to this patch is simply removing support for the
experimental format, which I am also totally cool with.

References:

Android uses a 4KB window for deflation:
http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/libcore.git;a=blob;f=luni/src/main/native/java_util_zip_Deflater.cpp;h=c0b2feff196e63a7b85d97cf9ae5bb2583409c28;hb=refs/heads/gingerbread#l53

Code snippet searching for false positives with the zlib checksum:
https://gist.github.com/1118177

Signed-off-by: Roberto Tyley <roberto.tyley@guardian.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

2011-08-11 13:02:47 -07:00

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