Silent error on git error `128 Error: fatal: detected dubious ownership in repository`

[Sieboldianus]

I already commented here on a closed issue:
#1282 (comment)

Description

@krassowski Using jupyterlab 4.3.4, (jupytext 1.16.6), collaboration-extension 3.1.0, and jupyterlab-git 0.50.2, the issue that was solved in #1285 is back for me:

RTC: is not a Git repository. To use Git, navigate to a local repository, initialize a repository here, or clone an existing repository.

If I install the latest jupyterlab and RTC versions pip install --pre "jupyterlab>=4.4.0a2" "jupyter-collaboration>=4.0.0a0", the RTC tag disappears, but jupyterlab-git is still unable to recognize the git repo. It now says:

You are not currently in a Git repository. To use Git, navigate to a local repository, initialize a repository here, or clone an existing repository.

.. even if I am in a git repo. I guess this has something to do with the new/updated content-providers API or workspaces (?)

Reproduce

1. Install jupyterlab 4.3.4, (jupytext 1.16.6), collaboration-extension 3.1.0, and jupyterlab-git 0.50.2
2. Open a folder with a .git folder
3. See > RTC: is not a Git repository. To use Git, navigate to a local repository, initialize a repository here, or clone an existing repository.

Expected behavior

Git folders are recognized.

[krassowski]

I cannot reproduce. Can you post a screenshot and logs from the jupyter-server with --debug flag?

[Sieboldianus]

Hi @krassowski : Many apologies. Just looking at the output with --debug helped to identify the problem:

lbsn-jupyterlab  | [D 2025-02-06 11:36:52.991 ServerApp.jupyterlab_git] Execute ['git', 'rev-parse', '--show-prefix'] in /home/jovyan/work/testrepo.
lbsn-jupyterlab  | [D 2025-02-06 11:36:52.994 ServerApp.jupyterlab_git] Code: 128
lbsn-jupyterlab  |     Output:
lbsn-jupyterlab  |     Error: fatal: detected dubious ownership in repository at '/home/jovyan/work/testrepo'
lbsn-jupyterlab  |     To add an exception for this directory, call:
lbsn-jupyterlab  |
lbsn-jupyterlab  |      git config --global --add safe.directory /home/jovyan/work/testrepo
lbsn-jupyterlab  |
lbsn-jupyterlab  | [E 2025-02-06 11:36:52.994 ServerApp] {
lbsn-jupyterlab  |       "Host": "localhost:8889",
lbsn-jupyterlab  |       "Accept": "*/*",
lbsn-jupyterlab  |       "Referer": "http://localhost:8889/lab/tree/testrepo/notebooks",
lbsn-jupyterlab  |       "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/132.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/132.0.0.0"
lbsn-jupyterlab  |     }
lbsn-jupyterlab  | [E 2025-02-06 11:36:52.994 ServerApp] 500 POST /git/testrepo/show_prefix?1738841812996 (733a19e64f80498989bb97e1e7354be7@172.18.0.1) 3.88ms referer=http://localhost:8889/lab/tree/testrepo/notebooks

After fixing the dubious ownership, everything worked again.

Closed as solved/false lead. Again, apologies - I really appreciate that you took the time looking into this! Thank you for your work.

[krassowski]

Let's reopen and re-title it. This error should be exposed in UI IMO rather than hidden in debug logs.