Signs of a too-old Git version
By Jon Jensen
July 28, 2008
When running git clone, if you get an error like this:
Couldn’t get http://some.domain/somerepo.git/refs/remotes/git-svn for remotes/git-svn
The requested URL returned error: 404 error: Could not interpret remotes/git-svn as something to pull
You’re probably using a really old version of Git that can’t handle some things in the newer repository. The above example was from Git 1.4.4.4, the very old version included with Debian Etch. The best way to handle that is to use Debian Backports to upgrade to Git 1.5.5.
On Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, or CentOS, the Git maintainers’ RPMs usually work (though you may need to get a dependency, the perl-Error package from RPMforge).
If all else fails, grab the Git source and build it. I’ve never had a problem building the code anywhere, though building the docs requires a newer version of asciidoc than is easy to get on RHEL 3.
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