Re: old but persistent problem: bad line length character

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 7, 2011, 18:06 UTC
Message-ID: <20110607180624.GA23752@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.10.1106071832470.4175@localhost>

On Tue, Jun 07, 2011 at 06:33:07PM +0200, Peter Kleiweg wrote:

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> I get this error message with git version 1.7.5.GIT: 
> 
>     fatal: protocol error: bad line length character:
> 
> Git version 1.4.4.4 works fine.

I can't reproduce the problem here. Can you try bisecting to find the commit that introduces the problem?

> How do bugs in Git get solved? I can't find an issue tracker.

You send an email to the mailing list and people work on it. :)

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> Details:
> 
> $ export GIT_TRACE=1
> $ export GIT_TRACE_PACKET=1
> $ git push 
> trace: built-in: git 'push'
> trace: run_command: 'ssh' 'github' 'git-receive-pack '\''pebbe/Gabmap.git'\''' 
> fatal: protocol error: bad line length character:

Your "ssh github" is weird. Usually that would be "ssh git@github.com", unless you have set up an alias in .ssh/config. Is that the case? If so, can you show us the alias? Is it going through a proxy machine or anything exotic?

> Setting GIT_TRACE_PACKET doesn't seem to have any effect.

That's probably because we never get any packets; the very first one is bogus, and we abort.

> I added some debug code in pkt-line.c, function 
> packet_read_line(). This tells me that 'buffer' that is passed 
> to packet_read_line() contains nothing but null characters, 
> while 'size' is set to 1000.

Yeah, it's expecting data to be written into it. You need to see what packet_read_line reads into linelen via safe_read (which is also printed in the error message, so it looks from the above like it contains NULs).

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> Running the ssh command as listed by trace works fine:
> 
> $ ssh github git-receive-pack 'pebbe/Gabmap.git'
> 00720444852406fd34c3eb0c8cdcb05cd2af979d2b34 refs/heads/master report-status delete-refs side-band-64k ofs-delta
> 0000

That looks normal. I wonder why git is not getting the same data.

-Peff