old but persistent problem: bad line length character

I get this error message with git version 1.7.5.GIT: 

    fatal: protocol error: bad line length character:

Git version 1.4.4.4 works fine.

I have read this was a very old problem, and there were some fixes, then how come I still get this in the latest version of Git? All the explanations I could find about this bug don't seem to apply for my case.

How do bugs in Git get solved? I can't find an issue tracker. 

Details:

$ export GIT_TRACE=1 $ export GIT_TRACE_PACKET=1 $ git push trace: built-in: git 'push' trace: run_command: 'ssh' 'github' 'git-receive-pack '\''pebbe/Gabmap.git'\''' fatal: protocol error: bad line length character:

The output above comes immediately. When I run the ssh command listed above, it takes time before I get a response. So even if Git does run the command, it doesn't wait for a response from the server.

Setting GIT_TRACE_PACKET doesn't seem to have any effect. 

I added some debug code in pkt-line.c, function packet_read_line(). This tells me that 'buffer' that is passed to packet_read_line() contains nothing but null characters, while 'size' is set to 1000.

Running the ssh command as listed by trace works fine:

$ ssh github git-receive-pack 'pebbe/Gabmap.git' 00720444852406fd34c3eb0c8cdcb05cd2af979d2b34 refs/heads/master report-status delete-refs side-band-64k ofs-delta 0000

On Tue, Jun 07, 2011 at 06:33:07PM +0200, Peter Kleiweg wrote:

I can't reproduce the problem here. Can you try bisecting to find the commit that introduces the problem?

You send an email to the mailing list and people work on it. :)

Your "ssh github" is weird. Usually that would be "ssh git@github.com", unless you have set up an alias in .ssh/config. Is that the case? If so, can you show us the alias? Is it going through a proxy machine or anything exotic?

That's probably because we never get any packets; the very first one is bogus, and we abort.

Yeah, it's expecting data to be written into it. You need to see what packet_read_line reads into linelen via safe_read (which is also printed in the error message, so it looks from the above like it contains NULs).

That looks normal. I wonder why git is not getting the same data.

-Peff

Jeff King schreef op de 7e dag van de zomermaand van het jaar 2011:

Is that git@vger.kernel.org ?

I made it read some more than 4 bytes. And this is what I get:

{27}]0;github git-receive-pack 'pebbe/Gabmap.git'{7}

Ah, I see! I have a wrapper set-up around ssh that sets the window title of the shell to the ssh command argument. That is what messes things up!

OK. Fixed now.

Peter Kleiweg <pkleiweg@xs4all.nl> writes:

That does not explain why you earlier said 1.4.4.4 works and more recent versions do not, though.

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Jun 03 19:09:42 <ShadeHawk>     Hmmm... for a while I had transient (i.e. fixed now) error
                                when fetching from git.kernel.org repositories
Jun 03 19:09:50 <ShadeHawk>     $ git fetch origin
Jun 03 19:09:59 <ShadeHawk>     fatal: protocol error: bad line length character: git:
Jun 03 19:10:24 <ShadeHawk>     but when I wanted to debug it (with GIT_TRACE_PACKET=2),
                                it was already fixed ;-P

$ git version git version 1.7.5

It might be not related with issue that Peter encountered, though.

Junio C Hamano schreef op de 8e dag van de zomermaand van het jaar 2011:

I downloaded the sources of 1.4.4.4 and compiled it. I get the same problem. I guess the pre-compiled version that comes from Debian uses /usr/bin/ssh, and when I compile it myself it uses the version of ssh it finds in PATH.