[ILUG] [Q] Weird(?) GIT problem, "fatal: cannot simplify commit ..."?

[Jimmy Tang]

Hi

On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 01:00:40PM +0200, Brian Foster wrote:
>   I've got a problem with 'git' that has me puzzled.
>  And I'm not a 'git' expert, which isn't helping.
> 
>   I recently cloned a (remote) repository:
> 
>       git clone git://REMOTE/PLACE
> 
>  I do not know the health of that remote repository
>  (I am attempting now to find out).  It _should_ be
>  healthy, since it is the master repository for an
>  embedded Linux project.
> 
>   No changes whatsoever have been made to the clone;
>  i.e., no adds, commits, et al.  And git-fsck(1)'ing
>  the clone does not report any problems.
> 
>   However, other git(7) commands, such as git-log(1),
>  are not happy:
> 
>      $ git-log A/FILE
>      error: Could not read 0fed9c2eb14eee47097e1d870fe8e55a6430edeb
>      fatal: cannot simplify commit
> dd3f3c0636cfd50719c706b030db5473b0270add (because of
> 0fed9c2eb14eee47097e1d870fe8e55a6430edeb)

It's probably missing a packfile that the repo is based on, some of the
more advanced git users like to share pack data files between repos. I
think the functionality is called git alternates. It may be just a case
of telling git where to find the alternates.


> 
>  Running 'git-log' on each plain file in the entire
>  clone finds a total of c.7 different cases, all of
>  the same general form as shown above.  Each case
>  happens hundreds or thousands of times.  There is
>  not a single plain file in the clone which doesn't
>  have the problem!  ;-(
> 
>   Generalissimo Google??? does find any matches for
>  « git "fatal: cannot simplify commit" » or similar.
> 
>   WTF?  I'm completely baffled.  I don't understand
>  what the message is (trying to) tell me;  or what's
>  wrong;  or what I should do about it.
> 
>   Any suggestions, pointers, help?
>

this might be of help

	http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitFaq?highlight=%28alternates%29

they might have just repacked without putting in the alternates repo's
objects or something along the lines of that. I don't use half of the
advanced features of git myself :P


Jimmy.
-- 
Jimmy Tang
Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing,
Lloyd Building, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.
http://www.tchpc.tcd.ie/ | http://www.tchpc.tcd.ie/~jtang