Description
Current behavior 😯
If you try to fetch a non-existant ref over https (github specifically), you get a vague error indicating that:
Error: Could not decode server reply
Caused by:
0: Failed to read from line reader
1: failed to fill whole buffer
Expected behavior 🤔
I'm not sure what to expect. But I hoped that the protocols involved would indicate that the references do not exist, and a better error message propagated to the user. Alternatively that the outcome would simply not be populated, and any refs specified which does not exist are simply ignored which is what happens if you do specify refs that exist alongside ones which do not.
Maybe this isn't an error at all, and I'm simply expected to enumerate the remote refs before attempting to fetch them, all though this would be racy since the refs can change between enumeration and fetching.
Git behavior
git fetch https://github.com/dtolnay/rust-toolchain refs/tags/stable
fatal: couldn't find remote ref refs/tags/stableSteps to reproduce 🕹
Note that I can only reproduce this on Linux , on Windows it seems to work as expected for some reason.
I've set up a minimal repro here where I try to fetch refs/tags/stable from dtolnay/rust-toolchain. Note that refs/heads/stable is actually what exists.
See: https://github.com/udoprog/playground/tree/gix-issue2
Rust version:
rustc 1.79.0 (129f3b996 2024-06-10)
binary: rustc
commit-hash: 129f3b9964af4d4a709d1383930ade12dfe7c081
commit-date: 2024-06-10
host: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
release: 1.79.0
LLVM version: 18.1.7