From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:25:17 GMT
Subject: Re: problem with updating a shallow clone via a branch fetch
Message-ID: <7vtyfng00i.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinx01bzzLKk=DfyEvfSz8Hun-YqzJfEDpX7gNSS@mail.gmail.com>

Rick Bradley <rick@rickbradley.com> writes:

> So I have a git repo that is shallow cloned:
>
>   % git clone --depth 1 <repo url>
>
> Sometimes (very rarely), when I do a branch fetch to update that
> repository I get an error:
>
>  % git fetch origin +refs/head/<branch>:refs/remotes/origin/<branch>
>
> fatal: did not find object for shallow <hash>

The message comes from the repository you are fetching from.  When you
fetch from a shallow clone, the fetch process on your end tells the other
side what commits your incomplete history ends at, and if the other end
does not have any of these commits, you get that message.  So the only
case (unless there is a bug---and I don't think this codepath is heavily
exercised so it is very possible there are bugs) you would see that
message is if the other side rewound the branch and then later garbage
collection lost the commit.