Re: Bug: Git: Clone: University Network: No Output on Terminal

From: René Scharfe <l.s.r@web.de>
Date: Feb 17, 2020, 19:38 UTC
Message-ID: <4d17a541-3c5c-0cf3-6ea6-11c214aa4674@web.de>
In-Reply-To: <CABVXwf6q1xMFhw+xd5f8GKATwC9k8mrXUkykpGgvTj7hv9pwEw@mail.gmail.com>

Am 17.02.20 um 09:02 schrieb Manish Devgan:

Show 20 quoted lines

> Hello,
>
> I am a university student from India and I was trying to clone the
> xfwm4 git repository from the git-url :
> https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4
> I was trying to clone this repository over my university network and
> it didn't work. I worked my way around by using my mobile
> wireless-hotspot for the same and was able to do it just fine.
> The next day I tried doing the exact same thing since I couldn't get
> an answer from our university if any such firewall was blocking me
> from cloning it. But this time instead of failing to reach the url the
> command ran with the following output:
>
> gabru-md@bhaalu:~/Desktop$ git clone https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4
> Cloning into 'xfwm4'...
>
> after waiting for a few minutes the command didn't fail but it didn't
> show any output/stats like it does when I try to clone a repository
> from Github which is definitely not blocked on the university network.
> for eg.

That doesn't sound ideal, but it also doesn't necessarily have to be a bug in the sense that git clone broke at some point. It could be caused by the server side as well.

What you see here is the default output of the so-called dumb HTTP transport. AFAUI it doesn't show any progress (yet?). You can get some kind of progress messages by dialing up the verbosity way up with repeated -v or --verbose options. E.g.:

   $ git clone -vvv https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4
   Cloning into 'xfwm4'...
   got 9a2556cfeedcc1b73cea36e5045073ecdf9fd39a
   walk 9a2556cfeedcc1b73cea36e5045073ecdf9fd39a
   Getting alternates list for https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4
   Getting pack list for https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4
   got 72b002b0f028fe610ba22035453647001e886969
   Getting index for pack 3a53ad6629b13fd830436a47c59b86e29b565d88
   got 600cb96c7eed28529fc8d5d0383d58070cb30957
   Getting index for pack 9ef7bd53f4441a79be936132e1c4cde62f6fd9a8
   Getting index for pack cef42fa75f4badc8e7ece5fee5ff8068dc8ae51b
   [...]

Show 8 quoted lines

> gabru-md@bhaalu:~/Desktop$ git clone https://github.com/gabru-md/stl-cpp
> Cloning into 'stl-cpp'...
> remote: Enumerating objects: 186, done.
> remote: Counting objects: 100% (186/186), done.
> remote: Compressing objects: 100% (128/128), done.
> remote: Total 186 (delta 92), reused 146 (delta 56), pack-reused 0
> Receiving objects: 100% (186/186), 105.58 KiB | 256.00 KiB/s, done.
> Resolving deltas: 100% (92/92), done.

This is the so-called smart HTTP transport at work, which does support progress output.

You could use the git protocol to clone xfwm4:

   $ git clone git://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4
   Cloning into 'xfwm4'...
   remote: Counting objects: 66501, done.
   remote: Compressing objects: 100% (16901/16901), done.
   [...]

Show 29 quoted lines

> Furthermore the interesting thing is that I expected that my attempt
> at cloning the xfwm4 repository might have failed but it surprisingly
> did not. The command did clone the xfwm4 repository for me but it
> didn't print out any stats/output during that time.
>
> After searching on DuckDuckGo I saw that adding flags `--verbose
> --progress` will allow me to achieve the desired functionality. I
> tried doing the same and the output is given below.
>
> gabru-md@bhaalu:~/Desktop/test$ git clone --progress --verbose
> https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4
> Cloning into 'xfwm4'...
> gabru-md@bhaalu:~/Desktop/test$ ls
> xfwm4
> gabru-md@bhaalu:~/Desktop/test$ cd xfwm4/
> gabru-md@bhaalu:~/Desktop/test/xfwm4$ cd icons/
> gabru-md@bhaalu:~/Desktop/test/xfwm4/icons$ ls
> 22x22  48x48  Makefile.am  scalable
>
> It is evident that the cloning worked perfectly fine but there didn't
> seem to be any output on the terminal. At first I was convinced that
> it was network error because it couldn't reach the target url but now
> it doesn't seem to be a network problem.
>
> I am not quite sure if this unfamiliar behavior while cloning a
> repository is a bug or not hence I thought of reporting it. Also,
> Apologies if this is not a bug but something which is known already.
>
> I am currently running git version 2.17.1 on my Xubuntu.

Git 2.25.1 shows the same behavior.

I guess the reason the dumb HTTP transport doesn't show any progress is that there is no way to know how much data it needs to download, so it can't calculate a percentage of work done. Perhaps showing a number that is incremented with each GET request or a spinning wheel or so could reassure users that git clone is still working?

René