Re: repository maintenance: git prints warning messages while cloning https://github.com/git/git.git

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 23, 2025, 10:35 UTC
Message-ID: <20250623103550.GA649507@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAB2ApcOds+SZszEHhMwG5YvxQcRE01jKgP1modo1WhcwWeGeYA@mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, Jun 22, 2025 at 07:00:49AM +0000, kryzet wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> While cloning the source code repository from
> https://github.com/git/git.git, the following warnings are printed:
> 
> warning: object d6602ec5194c87b0fc87103ca4d67251c76f233a:
> missingTaggerEntry: invalid format - expected 'tagger' line
> warning: object 2b5bfdf7798569e0b59b16eb9602d5fa572d6038: badFilemode:
> contains bad file modes
> [...]

These are fsck warnings. Presumably you've enabled transfer.fsckObjects (or fetch.fsckObjects) in your config file.

These lines are expected for git.git. It's an old project, and there are objects in the early part of the history that have some (mostly harmless) quirks. In this case, the v0.99 tag doesn't have a "tagger" field, and a number of old tree entries have mode "100664" rather than "100644" (we later standardized on a few modes, since recording the exact group mode on people's systems was prone to noise).

Since a git clone transmits the full history, those funny objects will live on forever.

You can safely ignore them, but if you want to quiet the noise you can put:

  [fetch "fsck"]
  badFileMode = ignore
  missingTaggerEntry = ignore

in your ~/.gitconfig file.

-Peff

PS There's one other small oddity, which is that running "git fsck" in
   the resulting clone will show only the tag warning. That's because
   fsck doesn't check badFileMode unless you also pass "--strict". But
   fetch/push checks are always done in strict mode. TBH I am not sure
   that is wise, but the behavior here is mostly historical. I suspect
   it would be good for somebody to take a careful look and clean up the
   severity of the various warnings (some of which are security
   relevant, and some of which are just mild misconfigurations or old
   bugs).