Transport error with Egit

Question

I have set up a gitstack repo on a local server, I have also signed up for a free github account just to see what its like.

But when I try to clone a repository from either my local repository or git hub repository I get this error:

Transport Error
Cannot List the available branches
Reason:
Exception caught during execution of ls-remote command

What does this mean and how do i go about solving this problem?

Answer 1

Please have a look at Can't clone remote git repository with EGit for several potential reasons. In cases where I had to deal with that error message, it was a wrong .ssh directory given in Eclipse or completely missing SSH keys in the ssh directory.

Answer 2

There is another transport-related possible error when cloning a remote repository.

Cloning from a repository that does not yet have any branches or tags but has other refs resulted in a "remote transport reported error", which has been corrected with Git 2.36 (Q2 2022).

See commit dccea60 (24 Jan 2022) by Jonathan Tan (jhowtan).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit d991df4, 09 Feb 2022)}

clone: support unusual remote ref configurations

^{Signed-off-by: Jonathan Tan}

When cloning a branchless and tagless but not refless remote using protocol v0 or v1, Git calls transport_fetch_refs() with an empty ref list.
This makes the clone fail with the message "remote transport reported error".

Git should have refrained from calling transport_fetch_refs(), just like it does in the case that the remote is refless.
Therefore, teach Git to do this.

In protocol v2, this does not happen because the client passes ref-prefix arguments that filter out non-branches and non-tags in the ref advertisement, making the remote appear empty.

Note that this bug concerns logic in builtin/clone.c and only affects cloning, not fetching.