magit-ph-pulls can't always retrieve commits

[23RoboticRabbits]

I've been doing a number of pull-requests reviews for the Greenplum Database (GitHub.com/greenplum-db/gpdb). I noticed that on a number of PRs (e.g PR# 2334) magit-gh-pulls is unable to retrieve the commits for the PR. When I run # f or fetch for that particular PR, mode-line update with connecting to api.github.com and then just hangs. After restart it fails to retrieve anything.

Problem persists after I clear the cache as well a trying on a newly cloned copy of the repository. The pull-requests that fail like this appear to be random.

I'm using SSH to interact with GitHub:

11:14 $ git remote -v
origin  git@github.com:greenplum-db/gpdb (fetch)
origin  git@github.com:greenplum-db/gpdb (push)

[matthewbauer]

I've been having the same issue. One thing to confirm would be that the fetch command actually works outside of magme. For me, at least, it seems to work fine in a shell.

[matthewbauer]

It seems to help setting a token to GitHub for gh.el... Perhaps it has something to do with needing login credentials to download lots of data from GitHub?

[eklitzke]

The problem appears to be related to ssh. I used strace() to debug my emacs that is having the same problem, and it's trying to fetch the other person's repository using SSH:

xxx.10489:execve("/usr/bin/git", ["/usr/bin/git", "--no-pager", "--literal-pathspecs", "-c", "core.preloadindex=true", "-c", "log.showSignature=false", "fetch", "git@github.com:jimpo/bitcoin.git", "wallet-pointer"], 0x7ffc69378f30 /* 62 vars */) = 0

This is incorrect, it should use https:// in this situation.

[eklitzke]

I looked at this more a few days ago, and it looks like magit-gh-pulls always uses the ssh url for pull requests, no matter what:

(defun magit-gh-pulls-fetch-commits ()
  (interactive)
  (magit-section-case
    (unfetched-pull
     (let* ((req (magit-gh-section-req-data))
            (head (oref req :head)))
       (magit-run-git "fetch" (oref (oref head :repo) :ssh-url)
                      (oref head :ref))))
    (pull nil)
    (invalid-pull
     (error "This pull request refers to invalid reference"))))

See that :ssh-url parameter when it runs git fetch? That means that it always tries to fetch the commits for a PR using SSH. This is totally unnecessary since the PR commits are added as refs in the repo, this way:

git fetch origin pull/ID/head:BRANCHNAME

See this GitHub page for details.

[sdwolfz]

Found a workaround by setting magit-gh-pulls-pull-detail-limit to a large number.

(setq magit-gh-pulls-pull-detail-limit 1000)