Issue 434: unable to chdir or not a git archive error

Reported by Jason Schwarz, Apr 15, 2010

I signed up for a new hosted InDefero site yesterday. I followed the 
EGit/Eclipse tutorial from 
http://wiki.eclipse.org/EGit/User_Guide#Eclipse_SSH_Configuration to 
create a new Git repo from an existing Eclipse project.

I created a DSS key, registered the public key with InDefero, then 
tried pushing the local repository to git+
ssh://git@encountr.indefero.net/encountr/android.git

Here's the response I got:

git+ssh://git@encountr.indefero.net/encountr/android.git: fatal: 
'/home/git/repositories/encountr/android.git': unable to chdir or 
not a git archive

As far as I can tell, this error means I *did* successfully log in, 
but something went wrong after that point. Version-wise, both 
Eclipse and EGit are the latest versions available from their 
respective repositories.

Comment 1 by Loïc d'Anterroches, Apr 15, 2010

Hi Jason. Can you try to push from command line without using EGit?

git init
git add .
git commit -m "initial import"
git remote add origin \ 
     git@encountr.indefero.net:encountr/android.git
git push origin master

I will be available again tomorrow morning to help. (Nearly 23h at 
the moment here).

Comment 2 by Jason Schwarz, Apr 15, 2010

Unfortunately, it didn't work. Here's the most verbose output I was 
able to coax out of it:

D:\java\eclipseWorkspace\encountrapp>set GIT_TRACE=2

D:\java\eclipseWorkspace\encountrapp>git push origin master
trace: built-in: git 'push' 'origin' 'master'
trace: run_command: 'C:\Program Files\PuTTY\plink.exe' '-batch' 
'git@encountr.indefero.net' 'git-receive-pack 
'\''encountr/android.git'\'''
FATAL ERROR: Disconnected: No supported authentication methods 
available
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

I'm not sure whether it has anything to do with the problem 
Eclipse/EGit is having, but I think the problem the commandline 
version is having is that it might be looking somewhere else for the 
key. Is there any way to make the key exchange more verbose?

Comment 3 by Jason Schwarz, Apr 16, 2010

OK, I'm not entirely sure how I fixed it, but I finally got it to 
work. The console-git problem was due to plink.exe not running. 

I'm not entirely sure what I did to fix Eclipse, besides madly and 
semi-randomly changing parameter(s) until it finally worked. 
However, it appears that some/all of the problem with EGit/Eclipse 
was that it didn't like PuTTYgen-created keys unless they were 
exported as OpenSSH. Also, Eclipse and PuTTYgen had different 
opinions about where the keys themselves were supposed to be stored. 


Even worse, Eclipse's General -> Network Connections -> SSH2 
-> General tab makes no attempt to verify that the keyfiles 
specified in "Private Keys" really exist in the directory 
indicated by the "SSH2 home" field. Rather than give a 
nice, sensible FileNotFoundException, it simply complains that no 
mutual communication scheme could be found.

Anyway, thanks for your help! :-)

Comment 4 by Loïc d'Anterroches, Apr 16, 2010

Great that you got it fixed, but not so great that it was through 
"random work". I don't like success without knowing why. I 
have never used Eclipse, it is maybe time for me to start using it 
to make a tutorial for the Indefero users.

Thanks for you perseverance and patience.

Status: Fixed

Hosted InDefero