gabriel / muse public
Open #89
filed by aaronrene human · 10 days ago

bug: muse clone stuck on fetch/mpack "server busy" (cold have=0 never completes)

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Issue draft — muse clone stuck on fetch/mpack “server busy” (pack never ready)

Target repo: gabriel/muse (and/or MuseHub staging ops)
Reporter: aaronrene
Date: 2026-07-13
Client: muse 0.2.0.dev4 (installed via https://staging.musehub.ai/install.sh)
Hub: https://staging.musehub.ai

Summary

Cold muse clone against staging never completes. Auth, hub ping, and muse ls-remote succeed. The clone loop repeatedly POSTs /{owner}/{slug}/fetch/mpack with have=0 and prints “remote preparing fetch data (server busy)” until --retry-timeout expires. No objects are written locally.

This blocks collaborators who need a fresh Muse checkout of large or any repo on this machine (reproduced on both aaronrene/knowtation and gabriel/muse).

What works

Check Result
muse auth whoami Handle aaronrene, hub staging.musehub.ai
muse hub ping --hub https://staging.musehub.ai HTTP 200
muse ls-remote https://staging.musehub.ai/aaronrene/knowtation Returns main + other branch tips
muse clone --dry-run … Succeeds (no network pack assembly)

What fails

muse clone --depth 1 --branch main --retry-timeout 300 \
  https://staging.musehub.ai/aaronrene/knowtation ~/knowtation-muse

Observed (representative):

[transport] POST https://staging.musehub.ai/aaronrene/knowtation/fetch/mpack  want=2 have=0
⏳ remote preparing fetch data (server busy, attempt N); retrying in 30s …
…
❌ Remote still preparing clone data after 300s — try again shortly.

Same pattern for:

muse clone --depth 1 --branch main --retry-timeout 90 \
  https://staging.musehub.ai/gabriel/muse /tmp/muse-tiny-clone

(want=3 have=0, same busy loop.)

Also reproduced earlier with --retry-timeout 1200 (20 minutes) on aaronrene/knowtation — never recovered.

Installed client transport (…/site-packages/muse/core/transport.py):

  • Uses fetch/mpack only (fetch/presign string absent).
  • Staging MuseHub tree for gabriel/muse recently shows a commit titled approximately:
    “fix: try fetch/presign before fetch/mpack to avoid Cloudflare…”
    That fix does not appear in the 0.2.0.dev4 sdist from install.sh.

Hypothesis A: hub pack assembly / indexing for cold have=0 fetches is stuck or never finishes (503 + Retry-After forever).
Hypothesis B: client should fall back to fetch/presign (per-object GETs) but shipped staging CLI never tries that path, so clones die on mpack prep / Cloudflare limits.

Expected

muse clone of a public or authorized repo completes within a normal budget (or returns a hard, actionable error with request id), and writes a usable .muse/ with objects.

Ask

  1. Confirm whether staging fetch/mpack pack prep is healthy for cold clones (have=[]).
  2. Publish a staging CLI that includes presign-before-mpack (or document how to force fetch/presign).
  3. If this is known 503-while-indexing: surface a terminal error / request id after N retries instead of an indefinite “busy” loop.

Non-goals / not the cause

  • Not an auth/handle problem (ls-remote + ping work).
  • Not missing mnemonic / wrong machine password.
  • Not specific to one private repo (fails on gabriel/muse too).

Workarounds for operators (until fixed)

  • Copy an existing .muse/ (or full Muse checkout) from a machine that already has objects.
  • Do not hammer clone (rate limits / Cloudflare 429 on unauthenticated probes).
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aaronrene opened this issue 10 days ago
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