git behind proxy: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout

Question

When trying to clone ANY repository via https from github, we get:

git clone https://github.com/rails/rails.git
Cloning into rails...
remote HEAD refers to nonex         


        

Answer 1

I've stumbled across the solution to this problem via this post:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/185459

The issue is apparently a bug in the libcurl version installed in Ubuntu server 11.04. Simply running apt-get install libcurl3-gnutls was not sufficient to solve the problem since it simply reported the latest version was already installed.

To solve the problem, I had to manually install the latest libcurl3-gnutls, and two dependencies, as seen below (obviously, after having downloaded them to my system first):

sudo dpkg -i libp11-kit0_0.6-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i libgnutls26_2.12.14-3_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i libcurl3-gnutls_7.22.0-3ubuntu1_amd64.deb

Hope this helps someone.