Git clone failing with "initial ref transation called with existing refs"

Question

I tried cloning my website repo and I got this error that I've never had before. I don't know if I should still try to use my local repo if its unstable.

chen@chen-laptop-uwu:/media/chen/storage/development/fleepy.tv$ git clone https://github.com/flleeppyy/fleepy.tv .
Cloning into '.'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 467, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (467/467), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (282/282), done.
remote: Total 722 (delta 266), reused 358 (delta 172), pack-reused 255
Receiving objects: 100% (722/722), 30.34 MiB | 2.12 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (356/356), done.
BUG: refs/files-backend.c:2956: initial ref transaction called with existing refs
Aborted (core dumped)

Answer 1

Any Git output that begins with BUG: means Git has self-detected some kind of internal error. You should report the bug, and try installing a different (newer or older) Git version to see if that can get around it.

In this particular case, the fact that you used git clone <url> . (with a literal dot) to clone into the current directory might have something to do with it. You could try cloning into a directory that git clone itself makes, by leaving out the final .. That's just a guess, though.

Answer 2

This is not an actual answer but a report which can help someone heading here for a clue.

I just got this error after trying to clone a random repo from github.

In order to fix it, I just removed the incomplete repo folder and tried to clone it again. This last time I got no error.