Re: git gc error - cannot lock ref 'RENAMED-REF..1'

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 3, 2010, 04:22 UTC
Message-ID: <20100403042211.GA22150@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <u2s76c5b8581004022038rf8aa0017l5dea55689c738fd9@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Apr 02, 2010 at 11:38:03PM -0400, Eugene Sajine wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 10:08 PM, Eugene Sajine <euguess@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I was running git gc weekly on my machine and today for some reason it
> > failed on one of my repos with an error saying
> >
> > Error: cannot lock ref ‘RENAMED-REF..1’
> > Error: failed to run ref-log
> >
> > The problem is I have no idea what it is talking about… “git show-ref”
> > doesn’t show anything even close to this name. Fools day joke?;)
> > Any advice?

If you look in the .git directory, is there a file named RENAMED-REF..1? I have no idea how you would create such a ref, nor why it would fail to lock (perhaps because of the funny name?), but removing it should probably clear up your problem at least.

The name "RENAMED-REF" is only used by git during ref renames, and those only happen when renaming branches (via "git branch -m") or remotes (via "git remote rename"). So presumably the source of the problem is related to one of those operations.

-Peff