Error "The reference did not exist" while listing branches

[krlvi]

Often times this happens on application startup. It has happened to be but also has been reported by users on discord:
https://discord.com/channels/1060193121130000425/1073202153163857920/1293975411684016128
https://discord.com/channels/1060193121130000425/1206670506271707156/1295647968803815424

My hypothesis is that this is a race condition getting BranchListingDetails for branches while the app is fetching from the remote

• upon opening the app, in the left sidebar with branches it is trying to show remote branches, and it is progressively fetching branch details for them
• at the same time the app is doing a "fetch"
• some number of those branches were already deleted at the remote, and after the fetch is complete, this is reflected locally too
• so while the app is fetching branch details, it fails to fetch details for the ones that are now gone

NB: It appears that the error is harmless, but it can be quite noisy especially if there were many merged branches

[anirudhsama]

FYI it seems to happen on every app launch as well, even when there are no changes on remote. See recording: https://cln.sh/XTrhxKPj

[Byron]

As one would expect, this is a gitoxide error, but the prefix seems to be added in the frontend, judging from the find_reference() calls in the backend.

This makes me think that the hex-hash prefix is the name of the branch, but I am not sure.

I could look into this if I could get a hint on how to reproduce the issue.