Re: How to debug "fatal: external diff died, stopping at ..."?

[Sebastian Schuberth <sschuberth@gmail.com>]

Thanks Jeff, I meanwhile found out that the diff tool also crashes
independently of its use with Git, and was able to isolate the problem
a bit further using gdb.

-- 
Sebastian Schuberth

On Mon, Jan 9, 2023 at 9:07 PM Jeff Hostetler <git@jeffhostetler.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 1/9/23 8:35 AM, Sebastian Schuberth wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > similar to this [1] question on StackOverflow, ever since a
> > distribution upgrade of my Fedora Linux box (KDE spin, now on release
> > 37), my configured diff / merge tool (Beyond Compare 4) crashes with
> > "fatal: external diff died, stopping at ..." after displaying the diff
> > for the first file, for every operation I've tried so far (including
> > resolving merge conflicts). I've also posted to the Beyond Compare
> > forums [2], but the people from Scooter Software seem to be clueless
> > as well.
> >
> > Would anyone have an idea how to debug this?
> >
> > PS: I also tried to use an X11 instead of a Wayland session with KDE /
> > Plasma, but that did not help.
> >
> > [1]: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1437667/git-difftool-with-meld-broken-after-update-to-22-04-fatal-external-diff-died
> > [2]: https://forum.scootersoftware.com/forum/beyond-compare-4-discussion/linux-aa/88824-bc4-as-a-git-merge-tool-says-fatal-external-diff-died
> >
>
> You might try turning on Trace2 in Git and see if there is
> any extra info there on the child processes.
>
> $ GIT_TRACE2_PERF=1 git difftool ...
>
> or
>
> $ export GIT_TRACE2_PERF=/absolute/path/to/logfile
> $ git difftool ...
>
> There you'll be able to see all of the "child_start" and
> "child_exit" events for each process that Git starts (at
> the "d1" level (and grandchildren at the "d2" level)).
>
> Maybe that'll reveal something.
>
> https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/a-deep-dive-into-git-performance-using-trace2/
>
>
> Hope this helps,
> Jeff