BUG?: builtins.fetchGit ends in an endless loop when used against an archived GitHub repository

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1

Hello.

We have GitHub - base48/old-wiki: Dump of old wiki pages repository which is public archive.
When builtins.fetchGit has been used against this repository, it ends in endless loop.

Easy reproducer:

strace -f -t nix eval --impure --expr '
  builtins.fetchGit {
    url = "https://github.com/base48/old-wiki.git";
  }
'

And it ends in endless loop on:

[pid 807896] 18:46:53 newfstatat(AT_FDCWD, "/home/user/.cache/nix/gitv3/0xcnqpnmcir8kishjyj3iv09lp1sa09h7l90pk0al5rq4gdxb08w/info/attributes", 0x7ffc90b28060, 0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 807896] 18:46:53 access("/etc/gitattributes", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 807896] 18:46:53 newfstatat(AT_FDCWD, "/home/user/.cache/nix/gitv3/0xcnqpnmcir8kishjyj3iv09lp1sa09h7l90pk0al5rq4gdxb08w/info/attributes", 0x7ffc90b28060, 0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
... etc ...

Do I’m doing something wrong?
It looks like nasty bug to me.

2

Hangs up here as well. GIven that git clone(and git2 clone) seems to work just fine I’d say it’s a nix bug.

1 Like
3

I tried it and, while it did take almost 50 minutes, the command did eventually complete with a correctly-populated store path and no errors.

fetchFromGitHub from Nixpkgs is much faster, as it uses the tarball endpoint under the hood; maybe use that instead?

2 Likes
4

Hello. Thank you for your patience.
So it’s not endless loop but it’s just slow.

I replaced it with:

oldWikiWebDir = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
    owner = "base48";
    repo = "old-wiki";
    rev = "master";
    sha256 = "sha256-FVwF6aicighnX3XXl/YI7fzKQ9U9l3meQKDZ7XgCifY=";
  };

and it’s much faster (maybe because it download tar.gz archive).

5

It’s not endless loop, but it’s very slow.
I’m going to fill a bug :).

1 Like