Useless error message?

"fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly"

Is that really meaningful ? Or maybe it is a configuration problem
on my side ?

  -- aghiles

I find that it usually means I didn't set up git-daemon-export-ok. Of 
course, that has usually been my experience.

Aghiles wrote:

"fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly"

Is that really meaningful ? Or maybe it is a configuration problem
on my side ?

  -- aghiles
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

  

Aghiles wrote:

"fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly"

Is that really meaningful ? Or maybe it is a configuration problem
on my side ?

Please, fix it. :)

The problem is this: as far as I can tell, the git protocols are
designed around the success case.  Sometimes if there is an error or
other interesting event, the servers are kind enough to notify the
user “on the side”.  But in the end, all too often, they do not bother
to inform the client _program_ that a fatal error occured.

We can’t just throw away this hang-up message because sometimes when
the remote host hangs up it really was unexpected.

So the trick is to make it expected more often.  See the side-band-64k
capability in Documentation/technical/protocol-capabilities.txt: the
goal is to have fatal error messages for as many failure modes as
possible.

Examples (I could be missing nuances; I am just trying to convey
the idea):

upload-archive:
 - a pipe(), write(), or poll() failure when communicating over
   the wire or between local processes will result in an unexpected
   hangup.  I have not checked, but I suspect a SIGPIPE can kill
   upload-archive, too.
 - On the bright side, all other error conditions are properly
   handled.  The code for this is very nice and worth imitating.

upload-pack:
 - a missing or shallow repo, HEAD or some other ref pointing to
   a nonexistent object, early protocol error, or failure to start
   rev-list or pack-objects will result in an unexpected hangup.
 - errors from rev-list, pack-objects, or the transition of the
   generated pack are correctly handled.

receive-pack:
 - all errors result in unexpected hup as far as I can tell.

daemon:
 - hangs up without an explanation (except to syslog) for invalid
   or disabled repositories
 - if the underlying service hangs up, hangs up.  If the underlying
   service writes a message to stderr, writes that message to
   syslog.  Surely the client is not interested...

If any other information would help, please let me know.
Jonathan

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 05:19:54PM -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Aghiles wrote:

quoted

"fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly"

Is that really meaningful ? Or maybe it is a configuration problem
on my side ?

Please, fix it. :)

I have seen a lot of users who plainly had a lot of trouble even
_understanding_ the error message - it is phrased in super-dense
networking jargon. I think something like

	"fatal: Server terminated the connection for unknown reason"

might come a long way (though of course specific error messages would
still be far more helpful).

(I assume that the remote end is the server since (i) it is most often
the case (ii) it is if you look at it through the client-server optics,
which may not always be the best one, but see (i).)

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
http://pasky.or.cz/ | "Ars longa, vita brevis." -- Hippocrates

Hello,

I have seen a lot of users who plainly had a lot of trouble even
_understanding_ the error message - it is phrased in super-dense
networking jargon. I think something like

       "fatal: Server terminated the connection for unknown reason"

might come a long way (though of course specific error messages would
still be far more helpful).

I would say that:

  "fatal: Server terminated the connection."

Is best and actually says what it has to stay. "Unknown reason" sounds like a
godly intervention into the git protocol. Sometimes, the "hung up" message is
given as an extra information that actually causes more harm than good:

 % git pull hummus
 fatal: 'hummus' does not appear to be a git repository
 fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

  -- aghiles