Re: Symbolic refs break ref advertisement on 1.8.4.3+

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 01:39:52AM +1100, Bryan Turner wrote:
>
>> Aphrael:example bturner$ for ((i=1;i<21;i++)); do git symbolic-ref
>> refs/heads/syms/$i refs/heads/master; done
>> Aphrael:example bturner$ git ls-remote .
>> fatal: protocol error: impossibly long line
>> fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
>> 
>> A symref= entry is written into the first packet of the ref
>> advertisement, right after the capabilities, for each symbolic ref in
>> the repository. Unfortunately, no splitting is done on that value and
>> so once you have 15-20 symbolic refs (more or less depending on path
>> lengths), you blow the 996 byte limit in format_packet (pkt-line.c)
>> and all further clone/fetch operations fail.
>
> Ick, yeah. I don't think there is a way around that with the way the
> information is shoe-horned into the protocol.  We should probably just
> revert 5e7dcad (upload-pack: send non-HEAD symbolic refs, 2013-09-17),
> and assume the HEAD branch name is short enough to fit.
>
> Another option would be to cap the number of non-HEAD symrefs we'd send
> (by counting up the bytes and keeping below the limit). That at least
> makes the "easy" cases work, but it's a bit too flaky for my taste.

Thanks Bryan for an easy reproduction, and thanks Peff for a
suggestion.  Let's revert that one for now.