Git pull hangs on SMB shared repository

bitbucket, git, macos, macports, msysgit

Solution

In the Git source, there seems to be a infinite loop in Git's fmt-merge-msg function when the repo sits in a SMB share while being accessed from Mavericks. The only way I've been able to fix this is by doing doing a process that doesn't involve automatic merging.

`git pull` is essentially a `git fetch && git merge` all in one command. If you try and do a `git fetch` into your current branch when there have been changes, you may run into an issue where the `git fetch` fails.

The way that I've fixed this issue is to fetch the remote branch into a temporary local branch and them merge that temp branch into your working branch. See the following which details trying to fetch the latest changes from your `origin/master` into your current working branch `master`.

Fetch the latest changes from `origin master` into a local branch called `master_merge_tmp`. `git fetch [<remote loc>] [<remote branch>]:[<local branch>]` allows you to fetch the latest changes without invoking `fmt_merge_msg` automatically and you can target a different local destination branch:

git fetch origin master:master_merge_tmp

Merge the `master_merge_tmp` branch into `master`:

git merge master_merge_tmp

Perform some cleanup by deleting the remote branch `mater_merge_tmp`:

git branch -D master_merge_tmp

Alternatively you could create a helper function to automate the steps above. You can place this in your `.bashrc` or `.zshrc`:

# Workaround for fmt-merge-msg issue on Mavericks w/SMB repo
# gfm [<remote>] [<remote branch>]
function _git-fetch-merge() {
  local remote="$1"
  local branch="$2"
  local tmp_branch="${2}_merge_tmp"
  git fetch $remote $branch:$tmp_branch
  git merge $tmp_branch
  git branch -D $tmp_branch
}
alias gfm="_git-fetch-merge"

Now from the terminal you can do the following:

_git-fetch-merge origin master

Or you can use the alias:

gfm origin master

If you are working with a remote upstream branch:

gfm upstream master

Problem

Original source