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

From: Bill Lear <rael@zopyra.com>
Date: Jan 22, 2007, 22:16 UTC
Message-ID: <17845.14245.559835.112658@lisa.zopyra.com>
In-Reply-To: <17845.5805.290668.552757@lisa.zopyra.com>

On Monday, January 22, 2007 at 13:55:25 (-0600) Bill Lear writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

>...
>>The attached patch on the local side (i.e. the one that pushes)
>>dumps "garbage" you are getting on the line from the remote
>>side, to help diagnosing the problem. ...
>
>I have asked the developer to install this and hopefully we'll
>get some feedback soon.

Looks like it is our developer's fault after all.

% git push
[...]
Unpacking 7 objects
 100% (7/7) done
error: protocol error: bad line length character
<<<<<
Unknown command: "#alias"
refs/heads/tau_mt_1: 0a5a7ac9b81a90500b9c9c44a22793890513cd5a -> 3d0c74c15953ad5bc6a71eefa623933163c4f05f
[...]

The problem is that his mailer is putting out:

    Unknown command: "#alias"

when it gets to the mail command at the bottom of the update hook. So, he's got a bad line in his .mailrc file.

I do think that some augmentation of the error output is in order, either as previously posted, or something fancier. It would be even better if this sort of thing did not trip up git, though perhaps I don't understand enough of how the update hook and git interact.

Bill