Re: "fatal error in commit_refs" from pushing to github

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On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 8:25 AM, Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 08, 2016 at 07:49:12AM +0700, Duy Nguyen wrote:
>
>> I got the message in the subject when pushing to github today. Yes I
>> know it's github, not git. But according to stackoveflow [1] it's a
>> local problem. Which makes me think, if we know exactly what this is
>> (or at least roughly the problem area), maybe we could improve git to
>> catch it locally in the first place (and because other git servers may
>> not have the same protection as github).  Jeff maybe you can reveal
>> something about this "fatal error in commit_refs"? I'm sure it's not
>> in git code. But I would understand if the answer is "no".
>
> The short answer is that it's nothing to do with Git or the client; it's
> GitHub-specific code running on the server that is outside of Git
> entirely.
>
> The long answer is that pushes to GitHub don't hit Git directly these
> days. They hit a proxy layer that speaks just enough of the Git protocol
> to relay to N separate receives spread across N replica servers[1]. Those
> receive-packs take in the pack and verify it, but don't actually update
> any refs[2]. Then the proxy layer runs its own set of policy hooks, and
> speaks a commit-protocol to each of the replicas so that they all agree
> on the new ref state. That last step is called "commit_refs" internally.
>
> So this is really an internal failure at the ref-update stage. There
> _should_ be a reasonable error message, but I think "fatal error in
> commit_refs" is the generic last-ditch fallback. I'll pass this along to
> people in charge of that code, as we should be generating a more useful
> error message.

Hmm.. I'm interested in this because the "fix" is from client side. I
did "git gc" and "git fetch" and the problem was gone. From this
description, I suppose C Git sends a good pack (phew!), but probably
with some stale ref or something that upsets this this last stage.
It's hard to make a connection back to either gc or fetch. Maybe gc
does ref trimming or something (that should probably be done by
git-push as well). Oh well.. maybe next time I see it, I'll get a nice
and clear message :)
-- 
Duy



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