RE: [Not Git Bug] Commit generates GC repack failure

RE: [Not Git Bug] Commit generates GC repack failure

[Randall S. Becker]

On January 14, 2019 10:07, Duy Nguyen wrote:
> To: Randall S. Becker <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>
> Cc: Git Mailing List <git@vger.kernel.org>
> Subject: Re: [Possible Bug] Commit generates GC repack failure
> 
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 10:03 PM Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 9:51 PM Randall S. Becker
> > <rsbecker@nexbridge.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi All,
> > >
> > > I'm trying to track down what happened this morning. We had a commit
> > > that caused a background gc to occur. What happened was:
> > >
> > > $ git commit -m "history commit ... "
> > > Auto packing the repository in background for optimum performance.
> > > See "git help gc" for manual housekeeping.
> > > warning: The last gc run reported the following. Please correct the
> > > root cause and remove .git/gc.log.
> > > Automatic cleanup will not be performed until the file is removed.
> > >
> > > fatal: open /dev/null failed: Invalid function argument
> >
> > sanitize_stdfds() in setup.c can attempt to open /dev/null then
> > redirect stdout and stderr to it. I think this is part of the
> > daemonization that is done in background gc.
> 
> However the message does not match. I think you will find this "open
> /dev/null failed" line in run-command.c

Mystery solved. The problem seems to occur with garbage collection on older versions of the operating system than the one we built 2.20.1 on. We sent out the advice to revert to 2.16.2, which was built on a prior revision that did not introduce incompatibilities. This was a specific situation with header files on a new version of the OS that introduced incompatibilities. The impact was not limited to the line in run-command.c, but was way more extensive.

Thanks for the help,

Randall