github for windows crashing several times a day

Question

I newly started working on Github via their native Windows Application, it's quite good however it's crashing so often and the horrible thing is that I lose all the recent changes after it's crashing. All the local files will rollback to the last version of the successful commit or sync.

I'm on a 64bit windows 8 machine. Any ideas?

The exact error after crash is Couldn't find a HEAD in this repository

Answer 1

I sent an email to GitHub For Windows support. Their answer was this:

Hi David,

I am sorry for the trouble.

I have been able to reproduce this problem, and have filed a report for our developers to look at. The reason the application is crashing is likely due to merge conflicts between the local and remote repositories.

The easiest way to resolve this would be to go into the repository that is saying 'failed looking for HEAD', closing that pop-up, and clicking Tools -> Open a Shell Here.

• From the shell, you can run 'git reset --merge' to undo the merge that caused GitHub for Windows to crash.
• From there, run 'git checkout master' to switch from the detached HEAD.
• After that, run 'git pull' in the shell to pull down any new changes. It will prompt you to fix any merge conflicts (which is what caused the app to crash).

Once you fix the merge conflicts in the files, you should then be able to sync correctly in GitHub for WIndows.

I have been testing this issue, and after I resolved the conflicts with the initial crash, I no longer had any further trouble with GitHub for Windows. It correctly prompted me to open the shell and resolve merge conflicts rather than crashing.

Let me know if you have any further questions, and hopefully we will have a fix out for this soon.

Best, Steve

Answer 2

This is the solution I received from Github support. I'll copy & paste the exact text here:

The easiest way to resolve this would be to go into the repository that is saying 'failed looking for HEAD', closing that pop-up, and clicking Tools -> Open a Shell Here. From the shell, you can run 'git reset --merge' to undo the merge that caused GitHub for Windows to crash. After that, run 'git pull' in the shell to pull down any changes. It will prompt you to fix any merge conflicts. Once you fix the merge conflicts in the files, you should then be able to sync correctly in GitHub for WIndows.

I have been testing this issue, and after I resolved the conflicts with the initial crash, I no longer had any further trouble with GitHub for Windows. It correctly prompted me to open the shell and resolve merge conflicts rather than crashing.

Answer 3

I had this problem after I made an unstable change to my .gitconfig user file.

I only detected the issue after I tried using TortoiseGIT and it outlined the error parsting the config file with an unexpected token.

So the fix was to correct the bad .gitconfig file.