Re: cannot handle more than 29 refs

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Dec 27, 2005, 19:18 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0512271113290.14098@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0512270840410.6812@gheavc.wnzcbav.cig>

On Tue, 27 Dec 2005, Jon Nelson wrote:

> 
> I get this message whenever I use --tags with git-pull with certain 
> repositories.

You shouldn't "pull" tags. You should just "fetch" them.

The error message comes from the fact that the pull is a "fetch + merge", and the merge logic tries to figure out what the common parent is with "git-show-branch". And the common parent finding is limited to 29 commits.

(Which is a very reasonable limit: the normal case is 2, and doing an octopus-merge with more than four or five parents is already insane. Much less 30 parents).

> The git repository is one, and so is my local repository. 
> I googled and got nothing. I grepped the git archive and got only 
> show-branch.c.  Can this be safely ignored? Is it a known shortcoming, 
> or something else entirely?

Well, it's a known shortcoming, but it really ends up being a sign of you doing the wrong thing and trying to merge all the tags together. The merge would almost certainly fail, btw, regardless of anything else.

Junio - I think we should make "git pull" refuse to merge more than one head. If somebody wants to do an octopus merge, they can use "git merge" instead. Hmm?

		Linus