Ken's Techno Tidbits

I ran into a problem yesterday, while trying to prune the size of the Bixo repo at GitHub (450MB, ouch).

I deleted the release branch, first on GitHub and then locally. This is what contained a bunch of big binary blobs (release distribution jars). But even after this work, I still had 250MB+ in my local & GitHub repository.

Following some useful steps I found on Stack Overflow, I could isolate the problem down to a few unreferenced blobs. By “unreferenced” I mean these were blobs with SHA1s that could not be located anywhere in the git tree/history by the various scripts I found on Stack Overflow.

I posted a question about this to Stack Overflow, and got some very useful answers, though nothing that directly solved the problem. But it turns out that a fresh clone from GitHub is much smaller, and these dangling blobs are gone. So I think it’s a git bug, where these blobs get left around locally but are correctly cleared from the remote repo.

But I ran into a new problem today with my local Bixo repo, where I couldn’t push changes. I’d get this output from my “git push” command:

Counting objects: 92, done.
Delta compression using 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (53/53), done.
Writing objects: 100% (57/57), 11.50 KiB, done.
Total 57 (delta 28), reused 0 (delta 0)
error: insufficient permission for adding an object to repository database ./objects

fatal: failed to write object
error: unpack-objects exited with error code 128
error: unpack failed: unpack-objects abnormal exit
To git@github.com:bixo/bixo.git
 ! [remote rejected] master -> master (n/a (unpacker error))
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.com:bixo/bixo.git'

No solutions came up while searching, but the problem doesn’t exist for a fresh clone, so I’m manually migrating my changes over to the fresh copy, and then I’ll happily delete my apparently messed up older local git repo and move on to more productive uses of my time.

[UPDATE: The problem does actually exist in a fresh clone, but only for the second push. Eventually GitHub support resolved the issue by fixing permissions of some files on their side of the fence. Apparently things got “messed up” during the fork from the original EMI/bixo repo]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 9:11 am and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.