git commit fails in RStudio GUI

[cthombor]

Hi, I'd suggest you add a room in Git-Hell to give some solace to the poor souls who attempt to Commit too much in one go.

Some in the blogosphere have expressed the opinion that there's a diff-limit of 100MB in github for each commit. I don't know about that; but twice now I have run up against what I imagine to be a working-space limit in my RStudio client (on Win11), with a splash screen warning me that I'm attempting an "extremely large" commit, and asking me "Are you sure you want to continue?" The only affordance on offer is "Show Diff". The display of the diff sort-of-works but is really sluggish (and eventually hangs my RStudio session -- which is a bit of a nuisance to kill off using Window's Task Mangler). So ... maybe you could add a word of advice about not clicking on that affordance to the folks caught in this region of Git-Hell who (we can only hope!) realise that you are offering such advice.

The workaround of "git reset HEAD~" worked for me. It's currently top-ranked in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40115723/undo-git-commit-in-rstudio-that-is-too-big-to-push -- I gave it +1. (I got an error message when I tried the second-ranked suggestion of "git reset --hard origin/master". But I don't know anywhere near enough about git -- nor about the possibly-relevant environment variables and other platform-differences in RStudio's shell -- to downvote that one.)

Anyway, after killing off the non-responsive RStudio process, restarting RStudio, and nuking the still-pending commit, I successfully performed multiple smaller commits.

BTW none of my files were anywhere close to the (AFAIK only rumoured) 100MB limit imposed by github. And none were even close to the 31.1MB mentioned on the RStudio warning page. (My best guess, having seen this warning twice "in the wild" and again just now when I attempting to enter this hellish state in RStudio, is that 31.1MB is the limiting size of its diff-buffer.)