msysgit git-submodule: "Unable to fetch in submodule path ..."

Hi!

This is with msysGit 1.6.3.2.1299.gee46c

I am having some problem when checking out a large project with many submodules. After cloning the superproject, doing a git submodule --init will fail with a "Unable to fetch in submodule path '...'" for one specific module (does this on all machines that we have tried it on). I cannot see any error messages from git-fetch itself:

   [...]
   Initialized empty Git repository in c:/Users/peter/src/foo/bar/modules/foo/.git/
   remote: Counting objects: 14752, done.
   remote: Compressing objects: 100% (5036/5036), done.
   remote: Total 14752 (delta 9278), reused 14752 (delta 9278)Receiving objects:  9

   Receiving objects: 100% (14752/14752), 5.07 MiB | 3501 KiB/s, done.
   Resolving deltas: 100% (9278/9278), done.
   Unable to fetch in submodule path 'modules/foo'

If I enter the modules/foo manually and enter

   git reset --hard

or similar, everything works fine, and I do have the complete history.

Looking at the code for git-submodule, it seems to suggest that git submodule is calling git-fetch without parameters, and checking the return value from it. It does, as indicated above, not seem to return any errors.

I tried adding a "-v -v" to the git-fetch command line in git-submodule, and I see that it does terminate early. With the other modules, I get a list of all the cloned branches and tags. But for this module, it stops as above. I get some additional debug output, but can't quite say it helps me much:

   Initialized empty Git repository in c:/Users/peter/src/foo/baz/modules/foo/.git/
   remote: Counting objects: 14752, done.
   remote: Compressing objects: 100% (5036/5036), done.
   emote: Total 14752 (delta 9278), reused 14752 (delta 9278)
   Receiving objects: 100% (14752/14752), 5.07 MiB | 3629 KiB/s, done.
   Resolving deltas: 100% (9278/9278), done.
   Server supports multi_ack
   Server supports side-band-64k
   Server supports ofs-delta
   Marking 76b96bfecc0d47013dd1fca1a555f12074eca814 as complete
   Unable to fetch in submodule path 'modules/foo'

The string "Marking %s as complete" seems to stem from mark_recent_complete_commits() in builtin-fetch-pack.c. The other messages seems to stem from do_fetch_pack() in the same file, so it gets there and not further. I cannot seem to find any exit point.

Does anyone know how to continue debugging, or know what might be going wrong?