If a remote repo has too many tags (or branches), cloning it over the
smart HTTP transport can fail because remote-curl.c puts all the refs
from the remote repo on the fetch-pack command line. This can make the
command line longer than the global OS command line limit, causing
fetch-pack to fail.
This is especially a problem on Windows where the command line limit is
orders of magnitude shorter than Linux. There are already real repos out
there that msysGit cannot clone over smart HTTP due to this problem.
Here is an easy way to trigger this problem:
git init too-many-refs
cd too-many-refs
echo bla > bla.txt
git add .
git commit -m test
sha=$(git rev-parse HEAD)
tag=$(perl -e 'print "bla" x 30')
for i in `seq 50000`; do
echo $sha refs/tags/$tag-$i >> .git/packed-refs
done
Then share this repo over the smart HTTP protocol and try cloning it:
$ git clone http://localhost/.../too-many-refs/.git
Cloning into 'too-many-refs'...
fatal: cannot exec 'fetch-pack': Argument list too long
50k tags is obviously an absurd number, but it is required to
demonstrate the problem on Linux because it has a much more generous
command line limit. On Windows the clone fails with as little as 500
tags in the above loop, which is getting uncomfortably close to the
number of tags you might see in real long lived repos.
This is not just theoretical, msysGit is already failing to clone our
company repo due to this. It's a large repo converted from CVS, nearly
10 years of history.
Four possible solutions were discussed on the Git mailing list (in no
particular order):
1) Call fetch-pack multiple times with smaller batches of refs.
This was dismissed as inefficient and inelegant.
2) Add option --refs-fd=$n to pass a an fd from where to read the refs.
This was rejected because inheriting descriptors other than
stdin/stdout/stderr through exec() is apparently problematic on Windows,
plus it would require changes to the run-command API to open extra
pipes.
3) Add option --refs-from=$tmpfile to pass the refs using a temp file.
This was not favored because of the temp file requirement.
4) Add option --stdin to pass the refs on stdin, one per line.
In the end this option was chosen as the most efficient and most
desirable from scripting perspective.
There was however a small complication when using stdin to pass refs to
fetch-pack. The --stateless-rpc option to fetch-pack also uses stdin for
communication with the remote server.
If we are going to sneak refs on stdin line by line, it would have to be
done very carefully in the presence of --stateless-rpc, because when
reading refs line by line we might read ahead too much data into our
buffer and eat some of the remote protocol data which is also coming on
stdin.
One way to solve this would be to refactor get_remote_heads() in
fetch-pack.c to accept a residual buffer from our stdin line parsing
above, but this function is used in several places so other callers
would be burdened by this residual buffer interface even when most of
them don't need it.
In the end we settled on the following solution:
If --stdin is specified without --stateless-rpc, fetch-pack would read
the refs from stdin one per line, in a script friendly format.
However if --stdin is specified together with --stateless-rpc,
fetch-pack would read the refs from stdin in packetized format
(pkt-line) with a flush packet terminating the list of refs. This way we
can read the exact number of bytes that we need from stdin, and then
get_remote_heads() can continue reading from the same fd without losing
a single byte of remote protocol data.
This way the --stdin option only loses generality and scriptability when
used together with --stateless-rpc, which is not easily scriptable
anyway because it also uses pkt-line when talking to the remote server.
Signed-off-by: Ivan Todoroski <grnch@gmx.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
In a struct definitions, unlike functions, the prevailing style is for
the opening brace to go on the same line as the struct name, like so:
struct foo {
int bar;
char *baz;
};
Indeed, grepping for 'struct [a-z_]* {$' yields about 5 times as many
matches as 'struct [a-z_]*$'.
Linus sayeth:
Heretic people all over the world have claimed that this inconsistency
is ... well ... inconsistent, but all right-thinking people know that
(a) K&R are _right_ and (b) K&R are right.
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The git-remote-curl backend detects if the remote server supports
the git-upload-pack service, and if so, runs git-fetch-pack locally
in a pipe to generate the want/have commands.
The advertisements from the server that were obtained during the
discovery are passed into git-fetch-pack before the POST request
starts, permitting server capability discovery and enablement.
Common objects that are discovered are appended onto the request as
have lines and are sent again on the next request. This allows the
remote side to reinitialize its in-memory list of common objects
during the next request.
Because all requests are relatively short, below git-remote-curl's
1 MiB buffer limit, requests will use the standard Content-Length
header and be valid HTTP/1.0 POST requests. This makes the fetch
client more tolerant of proxy servers which don't support HTTP/1.1
or the chunked transfer encoding.
Signed-off-by: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
CC: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The new protocol extension "include-tag" allows the client side
of the connection (fetch-pack) to request that the server side of the
native git protocol (upload-pack / pack-objects) use --include-tag
as it prepares the packfile, thus ensuring that an annotated tag object
will be included in the resulting packfile if the object it refers to
was also included into the packfile.
Signed-off-by: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This shares the connection between getting the remote ref list and
getting objects in the first batch. (A second connection is still used
to follow tags).
When we do not fetch objects (i.e. either ls-remote disconnects after
getting list of refs, or we decide we are already up-to-date), we
clean up the connection properly; otherwise the connection is left
open in need of cleaning up to avoid getting an error message from
the remote end when ssh is used.
Signed-off-by: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Copying the arguments from a fetch_pack_args into static globals
within the builtin-fetch-pack module is error-prone and may lead
rise to cases where arguments supplied via the struct from the
new fetch_pack() API may not be honored by the implementation.
Here we reorganize all of the static globals into a single static
struct fetch_pack_args instance and use memcpy() to move the data
from the caller supplied structure into the globals before we
execute our pack fetching implementation. This strategy is more
robust to additions and deletions of properties.
As keep_pack is a single bit we have also introduced lock_pack to
mean not only download and store the packfile via index-pack but
also to lock it against repacking by creating a .keep file when
the packfile itself is stored. The caller must remove the .keep
file when it is safe to do so.
Signed-off-by: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
These options are all strictly boolean (true/false). Its easier to
document this implicitly by making their storage type a single bit.
There is no compelling memory space reduction reason for this change,
it just makes the structure definition slightly more readable.
Signed-off-by: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
If we are using a native packfile to perform a git-fetch invocation
and the received packfile contained more than the configured limits
of fetch.unpackLimit/transfer.unpackLimit then index-pack will output
a single line saying "keep\t$sha1\n" to stdout. This line needs to
be captured and retained so we can delete the corresponding .keep
file ("$GIT_DIR/objects/pack/pack-$sha1.keep") once all refs have
been safely updated.
This trick has long been in use with git-fetch.sh and its lower level
helper git-fetch--tool as a way to allow index-pack to save the new
packfile before the refs have been updated and yet avoid a race with
any concurrently running git-repack process. It was unfortunately
lost when git-fetch.sh was converted to pure C and fetch--tool was
no longer being invoked.
Signed-off-by: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
