Re: Meaning of "fatal: protocol error: bad line length character"?

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Jan 22, 2007, 22:33 UTC
Message-ID: <7vireyr8t3.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <17845.14245.559835.112658@lisa.zopyra.com>

Bill Lear <rael@zopyra.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Looks like it is our developer's fault after all.  
> ...
> I do think that some augmentation of the error output is in order,
> either as previously posted, or something fancier.  It would be even
> better if this sort of thing did not trip up git, though perhaps
> I don't understand enough of how the update hook and git interact.

The updated receive-pack (was fixed with cd83c74c on Dec 30th 2006, has been in 'master', is in 1.5.0-rc2, and will be in 1.5.0) is supposed to make this a non-issue. Is it possible for your developer to use it? You can have a private install of receive-pack somewhere in /home/me/bin and tell git-push to use it with --exec=/home/me/bin/git-receive-pack.

With the fixed receive-pack, whatever the mailer says should not break the protocol exchange by leaking into it; instead, it should come back and shown to stderr, just like any output to stderr from the hook script.

The test patch I sent you should probably not be used as-is in the production, as it dumps literally everything to your terminal without limit, but I do agree that it helped us diagnose the problem in this case. Maybe limiting it to show the first few hundred bytes would be sufficient for debugging.