There has been a report in the Git for Windows project that gc fails sometimes: https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/issues/423 It turns out that there are cases when a remote HEAD can go stale and it is not the user's fault at all. It can happen, for example, if the active branch in the remote repository gets renamed. Git's garbage collector should handle this gracefully. The best this developer could come up with, is to simply ignore and delete the now-broken refs. Johannes Schindelin (4): gc: demonstrate failure with stale remote HEAD pack-objects: do not get distracted by stale refs mark_reachable_objects(): optionally collect broken refs gc: remove broken refs builtin/pack-objects.c | 1 + builtin/prune.c | 12 +++++++++++- builtin/reflog.c | 2 +- reachable.c | 26 ++++++++++++++++++++------ reachable.h | 3 ++- t/t6500-gc.sh | 15 +++++++++++++++ 6 files changed, 50 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-) -- 2.5.2.windows.2 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html