Subject: Re: "lock file exists" when fetching in bare clone of repository

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2025 08:13:44 +0200

On Thu, Aug 21, 2025 at 09:05:30AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> >     You're on a case-insensitive filesystem, and the remote you are
> >     trying to fetch from has references that only differ in casing. It
> >     is impossible to store such references with the "files" backend. You
> 
> "backend." -> "backend on your system."
> 
> >     can either accept this as-is, in which case you won't be able to
> >     store all remote references on disk. Or you can alternatively
> 
> I do not see the former as a viable choice, though.  When this
> happens, the clone or fetch fails and the user cannot catch up to
> the upstream development, no?  You have to futz with the fetch
> refspec to cause refs your filesystem cannot store ignored in order
> to make progress on other refs, but that is making the user do more
> than accepting this as-is.

Oh, yes, right now it's too involved. What I'm proposing is to mark the
transaction as allowed-to-fail, and in that case we'd be able to fetch
and store refs in this case again. The result would still be broken, but
it would be broken in a similar way as before. There's one difference
though: we'd accept the _first_ conflicting ref now, whereas before we
accepted the _last_ conflicting ref.

In any case, I very much feel like we should know to warn about this
case and guide readers towards a proper solution.

Patrick