"Invalid description in FETCH_HEAD" pull / sync in Visual Studio

Question

In Visual Studio 2013 when pulling my repository from GitHub:

An error occurred. Detailed message: An error was raised by libgit2. Category = 20 (Error). Invalid description in FETCH_HEAD line 2

From the command line, git pull and git push say everything is up to date, as normal.

Here is the libgit2 source code that generates this error message: http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/ALEXBIO/Git-Raw-0.27/xs/libgit2/src/fetchhead.c

Answer 1

This is a bug in the libgit2 library, which overlooked the fact that a single quote character might appear as part of a valid reference name.

There's a fix for libgit2 in the works, but short-term you might want to stay away from branches or tags with quote chars in them as a work-around.

Make sure to raise this via the official Visual Studio support channels so they can track this in their system as a bug.