`git gc` broken?

[Nico Weber]

Hi,

I noticed git printing

  Auto packing the repository in background for optimum performance.

  See "git help gc" for manual housekeeping.

a lot, so I figured I'd run that manually. I'm getting:

  $ git gc

  fatal: bad object refs/remotes/origin/HEAD

  error: failed to run repack

Does anyone else see this error? Is this something I can fix locally (how?), or is some object on the server bad?

Thanks,

Nico

[Alexey Efimov]

Hello,

Which version of git and OS?

Also will be nice to show `git show-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD` output

[Trent Apted]

I once had something like the first bit (git gc happening a lot) -- in my case git gc was crashing. Managed to fix it (overnight) by setting pack.threads=1 in the config and doing a `git gc --aggressive`.

Haven't seen the `bad object` thing after a gc though. It seems similar to the error you get after removing the `origin` remote and replacing it with a new URL. Then (assuming you're on [local] master) you need to `git fetch origin && git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/master`.

There's also `git fsck` which might fix "stuff".

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[Primiano Tucci]

did you happen to have a .git/object/refs/remotes/origin/HEAD (or any file called HEAD under .git/objects)

If that is the case, you might have mistakenly moved some file around at some point in the past.

Otherwise, what is the output of:

git rev-parse  refs/remotes/origin/HEAD

and

git cat-file commit $sha1_from_previous_step ?

I'd expect that if the objects that refs/remotes/origin/HEAD points to was really busted, your repo would be unusable.

> or is some object on the server bad?

Nah this looks a local issue.

--

[Nico Weber]

OS X 10.10.5

$ git --version

git version 2.3.8 (Apple Git-58)

`find .git/objects/ -name HEAD` finds nothing.

$ git rev-parse  refs/remotes/origin/HEAD

warning: ignoring dangling symref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD.

refs/remotes/origin/HEAD

warning: ignoring dangling symref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD.

fatal: ambiguous argument 'refs/remotes/origin/HEAD': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.

[Alexey Efimov]

Hello, also show:

git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD

But i think you have wrong refs/remotes/origin/<branch> where you pointed by refs/remotes/origin/HEAD

[Nico Weber]

$ git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD

refs/remotes/origin/trunk

(This is a fairly old checkout that has worked well for years)

[Alexey Efimov]

trunk? Svn branch?

So i guess you might simple replace HEAD to master for example:

git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD refs/remotes/origin/master

git fetch --prune

And then maybe your `git gc` starts working.