Problem: fatal oops during git fetch

["Tilo Schwarz" <tilo@tilo-schwarz.de>]

Dear List,

git really rocks!

Nevertheless, yesterday I stumbled into a problem, I don't understand. I  
use git for a software projekt, where up to five different computers are  
involved. On each computer the same git repository is used, main  
development happens on one machine, but bug fixes happens also on the  
other machines. Transfer medium is a USB stick, which I use with 'git  
fetch', 'git merge' and 'git push'. More than one year nothing strange  
happened.

Yesterday I tried to fetch bug fixes from one remote machine to the main  
development machine being on branch 'test' using

git fetch remote/test

I got something like

fatal: oops 'SHA1'
Fetch failed

Any ideas what happened here?

I tried various things to fix this without success. I ended up doing 'git  
cherry-pick' manually on the 5 commits I needed from remote/test, then  
discarded remote/test and pushed my local 'test' to remote. I remember,  
that maybe a branch was involved, which was already merged on a remote  
machine, but not on the main machine. But up to now git always resolved  
these things automagically.

As a side remark: I wished, the error message would have been a litte bit  
more detailed. My attempts to make any google sense out of something like  
'git fetch fatal oops' failed.

Regards,

     Tilo