Meaning of "fatal: protocol error: bad line length character"?

[Many thanks to Junio for explaining in generous detail how to think properly about branches in git's distributed model.]

We are making progress in our conversion to git, but one of our developers, on pushing into our company repo, has encountered this error:

% git push
updating 'refs/heads/master'
  from 6b421066e842203e383e1dc466c1cdef10de56b1
  to   2a8e554ae0c99d44988690c9fce693b3f5f128fa
Generating pack...
Done counting 61 objects.
Result has 32 objects.
Deltifying 32 objects.
 100% (32/32) done
Writing 32 objects.
 100% (32/32) done
Total 32, written 32 (delta 18), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking 32 objects
fatal: protocol error: bad line length character

The notion of fatality led him to think, quite plausibly, that something very bad had happened with his push. However, we can find no evidence that anything bad really did happen.

I did read through the code, and pkt-line.c seems to be the origin of this, and it does seem to short-circuit the read of the packet if this error is encountered. Of course, I have no idea what this really means...

Could someone please explain what this error means, and how to deal with it?

Thank you.

Bill