older git archive access broken in 1.2.0?

I was trying to find where something changed in the historical Linux
kernel git tree:
	rsync://rsync.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tglx/history.git/

when I noticed that the latest version of git doesn't seem to like this
archive.  I can't clone it, but 'git log' and 'git whatchanged' seems to
work fine.

Also, gitk dies with the following error:
$ gitk
Error in startup script: fatal: '.git': unable to chdir or not a git archive
fatal: unexpected EOF
Failed to find remote refs
    while executing
"close $refd"
    (procedure "readrefs" line 41)
    invoked from within
"readrefs"
    (file "/home/greg/bin/gitk" line 3744)


Is this because I just synced the whole tree over using rsync and didn't
use git to clone it a long time ago?  Or that it was created with an
older version of git?

I'm not able to clone it locally either:
	$ git clone history.git/ test
	fatal: '/home/greg/linux/git/history.git/.git': unable to chdir or not a git archive
	fatal: unexpected EOF
	clone-pack from '/home/greg/linux/git/history.git/.git' failed.

I don't know when this broke with git, as it's been a long time since I
looked at this tree...

thanks,

greg k-h