Re: "fatal: index-pack failed" on git-clone

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jul 8, 2009, 21:12 UTC
Message-ID: <20090708211201.GA21600@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <200907082242.51495.j6t@kdbg.org>

On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 10:42:51PM +0200, Johannes Sixt wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> At this point PATH is "/usr/local/libexec/git-core:/bin:/usr/bin". There is 
> no /usr/local/bin.
> 
> > trace: run_command: 'index-pack' '--stdin' '-v' '--fix-thin' ...
> > trace: exec: 'git' 'index-pack' '--stdin' '-v' '--fix-thin' ...
> 
> The PATH doesn't have 'git'; this must fail.
> 
> > trace: exec failed: No such file or directory
> > trace: exec 'index-pack' failed: No such file or directory
> > fatal: index-pack failed

I think there are two possible improvements here:

  1. Hardlinking "git" into exec-path. That means we will always be able
     to find the wrapper, even if the PATH has been munged. Admittedly,
     it sounds far fetched to me that something would exec from the PATH
     and then munge the PATH afterwards, but that seems to be what sudo
     is doing (and it is pretty commonly used).

  2. Better error messages. This would have been much more obvious to
     diagnose if it had said:

        trace: exec("git") failed: No such file or directory

     Johannes, I saw you just posted some related improvements to
     run_command; do they improve this?

-Peff