Re: index-pack died on pread

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jul 23, 2007, 17:04 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0707230956390.3607@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <333e1ca10707230552i34c2a1cfq9fae94f20023e9d7@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, 23 Jul 2007, Michal Rokos wrote:

>
> fatal: cannot pread pack file: No such file or directory (n=0,
> errno=2, fd=3, ptr=40452958, len=428, rdy=0, off=123601)

Ok, that's bogus. When "n" is zero, the errno (and thus the error string) is not changed by pread, so that's a very misleading error report.

So what seems to have happened is that the pack-file is too short, so we got a return value of 0, and then reported it as if it had an errno.

The reason for returning zero from pread would be:

 - broken pread. I don't think HPUX should be a problem, so that's 
   probably not it.

 - the pack-file got truncated

 - the offset is corrupt, and points to beyond the size of the packfile.

In this case, since the offset is just 123601, I suspect it's a truncation issue, and your pack-file is simply corrupt. Either because of some problem with receiving it, or because of problems on the remote side.

> fetch-pack from 'git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git' failed.

One thing to look out for is that the "git.kernel.org" machines aren't the "primary" ones, and the data gets mirrored from other machines. If the mirroring is incomplete, I could imagine that the remote side simply ended up terminating the connection, and you ended up with a partial pack-file.

Some of the kernel.org machines ran out of disk space the other day, so maybe you happened to hit it in an unlucky window. Does it still happen?

		Linus